Porter’s Pensées

Michael Fallon, the new Defence Secretary, plans to institute military cadet corps in schools. The idea, apparently, is not only to provide future recruits for the British Army, but also to instil discipline and ‘British values’ in our youth. Yes; that last claim is so problematical as to be almost ludicrous. I don’t need to waste time arguing the emphatically non-military nature of the ‘British values’ that I most respect. (Or the case against calling any of them, military or non-military, ‘British’ in any exclusive way.) The only point I want to make here is that Fallon’s plan might be counter-productive. It was with me.

School cadet corps started up in the later nineteenth century in order to encourage national and imperial patriotism. Most Public schools had them; state schools refused to, out of anti-militaristic principle. (That was one reason why Baden-Powell founded his Boy Scout movement.) So far as I know the Public schools have them still. So do, or did, the Grammar schools that liked – pathetically – to ape the Public schools, such as mine. At my ‘direct grant’ school ‘Corps’ was compulsory, parading in uniform every Thursday afternoon, going on soggy, chaotic camps, and practicing shooting on a rifle range on the Rainham marshes. The only way of getting out of it was with a note from your parents to say they were pacifists, and even then you didn’t entirely escape it, but had to go into a ‘Medical’ squad, still in uniform, but with bright white webbing rather than the usual khaki to show up your cowardly nature to the other boys. I was too genuinely cowardly to risk that. Everyone hated the Corps, except for a few fascist-minded boys; who formed the ‘Right Wing National Party’ in our school ‘mock’ elections, and went around with little polished sticks shouting themselves blue in the face. Many of them went on to Sandhurst, one of them after being expelled from school for his part in a gang-rape. The rest of us resented them, and the whole business of Blancoing our webbing, Duraglitting our brass, ironing neat creases into our tunics, and shining our boots ‘so you can see your faces in them’.

I hated Thursday afternoons, especially the mechanical waving your arms about and marching up and down in lines. ‘Squad, atten – wait for it, wait for it – shun!’ On the other hand I quite liked – and was good at – the shooting. Even there we could be easily distracted – on one occasion, I remember, by a sheep wandering across. We all turned our rifles to blow it into a ball of wool, bones and blood. ‘Sorry, Sarg, I missed.’ God what a farce. I learned nothing, except perhaps how to strip down a 1914 Bren gun, and even then I couldn’t put it together again. I was only promoted at the very end because they thought it would look bad if I went up to university still a private. I was jumped up to colour-sergeant on the last day of school.

I’m sure Corps prejudiced most of us against the Army: unfairly, as I came to realize later. Most soldiers aren’t militarists. Notoriously, that’s left to draft-dodgers, like George W Bush. I’ve met some very reasonable and even liberal military men. (No military women yet, I’m afraid.) But my school cadet corps played no part at all in this realization; and in fact only made me appreciate more, through aversion to it, the non-military ‘values’ in British history and life. Maybe – though I doubt it – that’s what Michael Fallon intends.

[An edited version of this also appears on the LRB Blog (http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/11/01/bernard-porter/sorry-sarge/), corrected to take account of one of Andrew Rosthorn’s comments, below.]

What more can one say about the current ghastly state of affairs in America? That Trump is a vain, childish proto-fascist; that Clinton is too enmeshed with the neo-liberal establishment to inspire enthusiastic support; that the best historical parallel – my area – is with the rise of the European dictators in the 1930s, which is hardly a novel observation; and that – from an even broader historical perspective – this really is beginning to look like the ‘final stage’ of global capitalism, presaging its collapse, that has been fondly and repeatedly anticipated by Marxists for a hundred years. There’s nothing much to add to this – yet. After the American election – which I’ll be staying up all next Tuesday night for (or all week, if it’s anything like the ‘hanging chads’ election of 2000) – we’ll see.

In the meantime we thought we might seek some distraction from all this horror by going to an opera. The one we chose also featured some British imperial history – ideal, it seemed, for me. Unfortunately Philip Glass’s Satyagraha proved not to be a distraction at all, unless it was from life itself. I’d always been prejudiced against ‘minimalist’ music. Now I no longer am. ‘Prejudice’ involves pre-judging, on the basis of ignorance. But now I know. I found the experience mind-numbing, but not in a restful way; and totally unenlightening with regard to the Mahatma. The contribution of Cirkus Cirkor (modern circus) to it – juggling, tumbling, (fairly) highwire walking, and so on – provided some relief, I suppose – they were very clever – but seemed to have nothing at all to do with either the subject-matter or the plot. OK, I don’t understand minimalism; or perhaps my hearing is too unsophisticated to appreciate the (very) subtle modulations in the music, so I shouldn’t judge. And won’t.

But it did sound rather like a long speech by The Donald: the same clichés repeated monotonously over and over again. I’m only sorry I was less mesmerized than Trump’s supporters clearly are. But then I expect both my music and my politics to be just a little bit more complicated.

For anyone seeking a subtler and more pleasurable form of distraction, you should see Steven Frears’s Florence Foster Jenkins, which we thoroughly enjoyed last night. It brought me back to life; and to blogging.

In the meantime, History continues along its predetermined path. Europe agrees to an international trade deal – CETA – which subordinates democracy to capitalism: why oh why couldn’t the Walloons hold out? – so bringing us that little bit nearer to red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism’s final victory; and Marx is proved more prescient than anyone gave him credit for. Except for his view of the proletariat, who might yet be diverted by Trumpism and Ukippery from its historic role as the saviours of humanity.

Back in Sweden. I’ve agreed to talk to a Stockholm law firm next month about Brexit. They want a British-historical angle on it. They say they ‘don’t understand it’. I’m not sure I do either; but I’ll give it a go, and report on the meeting here.

‘I’m a free American, and so can believe anything I like’. That remark, which I heard on American radio some years ago, and quoted in a previous post (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/22/btl/), has niggled me ever since, and makes more sense than ever in the light of the current Presidential election campaign, which, among other things, must be the stupidest – there’s no other word for it – in American history. (To be fair, Britain’s EU referendum battle wasn’t far behind.)

There are doubtless many reasons for it, apart from the possibility that the human race is degenerating intellectually. (I’ve just learned – from a book I’m reviewing – that August Strindberg believed that Darwin had it wrong, and that humans were evolving, or devolving, into apes, rather than the other way around. That figures.) The decline of reading, poor education, the consumerist approach to knowledge, short attention-spans, the effect of television and the internet, the rise of fashionable ‘anti-intellectualism’… I’m not sure where to point the finger.

One solution, however, might be to teach Logic in schools. It’s not a difficult subject; or rather, there are levels at which it wouldn’t need to be difficult. It could be dressed up attractively. If it got boys and girls thinking clearly – making rational choices, using evidence, spotting inconsistencies in arguments, thinking in joined-up ways – it would be bound to prepare them to take all kinds of adult life decisions, including their democratic ones, more rationally and reliably. Even if it taught them in the end to discard logic, they would be aware that they were doing it, and have reasoned why.

Is there anywhere in the world where Logic is taught as a discrete and core subject in schools? It is taught implicitly in Maths, of course, and I’m sure that teachers of other subjects – like Science and even History – encourage logical thinking too. Apart from that, I’ve never heard of any school in Britain, the USA or Australia – which mark the limits of my rather thin acquaintance with school pedagogy – that has ‘Logic’ expressly on its syllabus. Why not? It could be the most valuable education of all.

What we’re getting now, both in America and in Britain, is a very large disaffected working or lower-middle class, largely disillusioned with establishment politics and policies, but split between Right and Left. In Britain half of them go to Ukip, half to Corbyn’s Labour. In the USA almost exactly the same interest group is (or was) equally divided between Trump and Bernie Saunders. Look at Trump’s and Farage’s rhetorics when it comes to the economy: populist, anti-austerity, anti-globalisation and anti-privilege. These are essentially and traditionally left-wing causes, and ought by rights, therefore, to put these people on the social(ist)-democratic side. For a number of reasons, however, half of them are adhering to Trump and Ukip, which has the effect of fatally dividing the anti-capitalist majorities in both countries, so allowing the old establishment – Hilary, Theresa – to sneak through the middle and keep things as they were. That’s why politics on both sides of the Atlantic are so fundamentally unrepresentative of their peoples today.

The likeliest reason for these unnatural divisions appears to be immigration, which is the only obvious policy difference between the two anti-capitalist tribes. Persuade Ukip voters and Trumpists that immigration is not the cause of their economic and other woes, and there will be little to prevent their joining up with their left-wing soul mates in an irresistible movement against the late capitalist status quo. There are two ways of doing this: through reasonable argument – persuading people that immigrants are not to blame for everything; or alternatively by giving ground to the anti-immigration lobby to some degree. I would be sorry to see the latter, but it may be necessary; and there is after all nothing particularly anti-socialist about opposing free trade in labour, as well as in goods.

The thing is, Trump is tapping a genuine and understandable resentment among relatively poor Americans; is right about some things – trade agreements especially; and has a point when he claims that he has a biased press ranged against him. In Britain, Labour knows too much about hostile newspapers to dismiss that complaint as merely paranoid. In every other way, of course, Trump is a mean-minded, petty, ignorant, whingeing, childish, lying, amoral, unstable, sexist fool; which is why – and probably the only reason – Clinton will beat him. I’m not thrilled by that prospect; but of course Trump has to be pulled down, in the interest of the whole world.

My only hope for America is that a victorious Clinton also comes to see the force of the anti-capitalist/globalisation resentments of those who supported both Trump and Saunders, extricates herself from the embrace of big business, which is the main thing that makes people distrust her now, declares her independence from the Washington clique she is inevitably associated with, and pursues some bold new policies: of the kind that Saunders has been urging on her, and that her great predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt implemented so successfully eighty years ago. A new ‘New Deal’. That would do it. I can hear Trump’s working-class support hissing out of the great orange-topped barrage-balloon now. Unfortunately I can’t see Theresa May doing the same thing, despite her gilded words when she took over as prime minister (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/07/11/st-theresa/). In which case the important thing will be to gather the anti-globalisers of Left and Right together again, and into power.

I’ve watched the first two live ‘debates’ between Trump and Clinton, and am determined to watch the third, at 2 a.m. (our time). Friends tell me they can’t – it’s all too depressing. Kajsa, in Stockholm, says she won’t watch it alone. (We saw the last one together. It helped, being able to cling on to each other.)

Why is it that I’m so attracted by this sort of thing? I watch films of Hitler’s speeches, too, transfixed, like a rabbit caught in the headlights. It’s only political horror that thrills me this way; I don’t watch disaster movies, for example, or horror films, or any kind of fighting, or pornography. Trump, in fact, seems to be my own particular form of pornography. I watch him with deep loathing, but I have to admit that his loathsomeness is part of the attraction. I also feel dirty afterwards. What does that make me? Is it a male thing? Or am I a pervert of some kind?

‘Insular’ and ‘xenophobic’ are two words that seem to fit the British to a T (or two Ts), and to account, in part, both for Brexit and for the outbreak of chauvinism that has followed it – including insults and even physical attacks directed at foreigners. Historically however that is nonsense. Of course Britain has always been insular literally – i.e. a group of islands – but never culturally, politically or spiritually, with her 400-year old Navy easily overcoming the disadvantage of that narrow stretch of water between her and the Continent, and giving her far greater contact with the ‘wider world’ – beyond Europe – than any of her European neighbours. Britain has probably been the most ‘outward-looking’ nation in all history. Some of this outward-lookingness has expressed itself imperially, but by no means all of it, and even imperialism was not simply a matter of her imposing her own insular views on others. It involved give and take; genuine ‘internationalism’, in a sense. (See my British Imperial.) Here the physical map of Europe is misleading. Britain may be an island; but she was never insular. In any case, as John Donne famously wrote, no man is.

It may have been her geographical insularity that gave rise to the myth that her people were particularly xenophobic, both abroad, of course, but also at home, where the chauvinistic Englishman was a favourite trope of novelists, including Dickens and Thackeray, who may have thought – and certainly enjoyed giving the impression – that this was a unique characteristic of their compatriots. (I’ve written about this, too: “‘Bureau and Barrack’: Early Victorian Attitudes towards the Continent”, in Victorian Studies, vol.27 no.4 (1984), pp. 407-33.) This is where the myth of the arrogant British tourist originated, though it will have been strengthened by some genuine bad behaviour by Britons afterwards. In fact there’s no evidence – and probably no way of finding any – that the British were any more xenophobic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, either abroad or at home, than most other peoples; and quite a few signs that they were a good deal less so than, for example, the proudly isolationist Chinese. So far as racial attitudes were concerned a study of geography teaching in Swedish schools suggests that the Swedes must have been more conventionally ‘racist’ than British schoolchildren; in part, I would suggest, because Sweden hadn’t had any significant colonial experience. (And the Swedes can still be pretty nationally arrogant today – with good reason, I would say.) At the very least, Britons should not be tarred as particularly ‘xenophobic’, at any time over the past 200 years.

And there’s evidence the other way. Britain was always a multi-cultural, multi-‘racial’, and even multi-national country, and for most periods of her history deeply proud of this. History books emphasized her mongrel beginnings: Celts, Saxons, Danes and Normans originally, with later waves of immigration spicing the mixture – mainly Irish, French Huguenots and Jews; culminating in the great Caribbean and Asian immigrations of the 1950s onwards; all as part of the fundamental British narrative. You’ll find very few writers over the last two centuries celebrating Britain’s racial homogeneity, simply because that would be impossible. Some of these waves of immigration caused problems (to put it mildly): the Danes and Normans especially – after all, they came as conquerors and colonists; but there were also localized and short-lived protests against Jewish immigration in the early 1900s, and of course against ‘coloured’ immigration in the post-war years. That seems natural, in view of the social disruptions these immigrations could cause. But things always calmed down. In the nineteenth century Britain prided herself on the welcome she gave to foreigners. That’s why she had no laws to prevent them coming in or to expel them if they misbehaved. (Not many people know that.) Britain’s doors were entirely open to everyone.

That included political refugees in particular. Britain was the main destination for Continental dissidents fleeing from oppression at home – usually revolutionary, even anarchist, though occasionally royalist – throughout the nineteenth century; dissidents who famously included Karl Marx, who was known to be a bit of a firebrand while he was writing his magnum opus in the British Museum Library, and alarmed some nervous politicians, but who could never have been expelled from Britain, even if there had been a law to allow it, without antagonizing just about the entire British public. The latter tended to blame foreign governments for the refugees’ excesses. Expelling Marx – or whomever – would have meant giving in to foreign tyranny. Even murderers were exempted from Britain’s very weak and patchy extradition laws, if their murders had had ‘political’ motives. Continental governments complained forcefully, even threatening war with Britain over the ‘refugee question’ at one point in the 1850s; but the British government refused to budge. (This is the subject of my The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics, 1979.) Asylum was sacrosanct.

And there’s little evidence that foreign refugees, immigrants, visitors or workers were ever treated particularly hostilely by the British public in this early period; as they weren’t either, by and large, before Brexit. Most were warmly welcomed. For Britain this paid off handsomely: many of her leading industrialists, like Alfred Mond, came from immigrant stock, as well as the novelist Joseph Conrad (Polish) and the composer Frederick Delius (Norwegian). And then of course there was the Royal Family. ‘Never forget,’ Queen Victoria once told her son Edward when he was thinking of siding with the French in the Franco-Prussian War, ‘that we are Germans.’ But that didn’t seem to affect her popularity later on.

I once planned a book on this: on Britain’s almost unique tradition of internationalism in modern history. There’s much more to be said about this than I have room for in this post. The book was to be called Cosmopolis. I even got a publisher’s contract for it; but sadly I never got beyond the first couple of chapters. If I can rouse the energy, I might have another go at it. If it does nothing else it might show how Brexit and its aftermath can’t be explained in terms of a long and peculiar ‘insular’ history. And indeed how they fly in the face of one great British tradition, at any rate.

When I voted for ‘Remain’ on June 23rd, it wasn’t out of any great enthusiasm for the European Union as it is, or of hope for what it might become, but because I felt that its negative effects on Britain were marginal, nothing like as damaging as the Brexiteers claimed; and offset by a number of similarly marginal but still important advantages, both personally, as a bi-national resident – shortly to become a dual citizen, I hope – and more generally, arising out of some (not all) of the social and legal legislation it has forced on reluctant British governments over the last few years. So far as Britain’s present problems are concerned, none of them, I felt, had anything at all to do with our membership of the EU, but were more the effects of runaway capitalism, which I trusted a ‘sovereign’ right-wing Brexit-dominated British government to grapple with much less effectively than one that was still constrained, to an extent, by the relative ‘statism’ that the EU represented. As a Leftist I valued the support of our socialist and anti-austerity comrades on the Continent, and the help we might give to them. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2016/08/31/two-cheers-for-the-eu/.) I thought our mutual progressive causes stood more chance within Europe than outside. I also, incidentally, wanted to remain friendly and solidaric with foreigners.

I certainly wasn’t taken in by that now notorious slogan on the side of the ‘Brexit battlebus’, promising that the £350 millions a week that Brexit would (allegedly) save the country could be spent on our ailing NHS. But it’s possible that many were. I wonder how they now regard Theresa May’s screeching U-turn on that particular promise (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/14/no-extra-money-for-nhs-theresa-may-tells-health-chief); or the prospect of higher prices (of imports, due to the plunging pound) that now seems to be the inevitable implication of that decision on June 23? How many people were warned that their Marmite, of all things, was under threat? (Most were probably under the illusion that we made it ourselves.) Might they not be feeling now that they were sold a pup? If not, shouldn’t they be? At the time many of us lamented the very low quality of the debate surrounding the referendum, on both sides (except Corbyn’s), so that outrageous lies were told, and corrected, but then still persisted in, usually by politicians who were regarded by many foreigners (as a part-time expatriate I know this) as simple clowns. But the clowns won; not just because of their propaganda, and certainly not because of the voters’ credulity or stupidity, but because of the underlying – and I would say reasonable – contempt that so many of those voters had for the political ‘establishment’ that was plugging the ‘Remain’ line; which contempt was rooted in turn in the underlying failings of our economic and political systems. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/.)

In any rational society that should be good cause for a re-run of the whole thing. The nation voted as it did – narrowly, we must remember – on what has turned out very quickly to be a false manifesto. Whether it would have voted any differently if it had not been so deceived is impossible to say. Hostility to the ‘establishment’ might have won the day in any case: just as much of Donald Trump’s support in America appears to be entirely unfazed by his lies and the scandals surrounding him. Academics are talking now of a ‘post-truth’ political discourse; it may also have become a post-rational (or, if you like, though this is a more scholarly term, a ‘postmodern’) one. It has happened before. You can’t argue with these people. If you try to, they tend to put you down as an intellectual snob. As Michael Gove said during the course of the referendum campaign: ‘I think people in this country have had enough of experts.’ And that coming from an ex-Education Minister. Which only goes to show how deeply – or high – the anti-rational bug has penetrated.

But almost no-one on the old ‘Remain’ side is pressing for a re-match. They’re too nervous. Anyone still expressing doubts, even, about Brexit – that is, at least 48% of the population – is branded a ‘whinger’ and even a ‘traitor’ by the right-wing tabloid press. (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/daily-mail-express-brexit_uk_57fdfd14e4b08e08b93d2ad3.) Now that ‘the people’ have spoken, it’s wrong to express any criticism at all of the decision to pull out of the EU, or even to offer constructive ideas about how it might be done with least harm to the UK. Which is why ex-Remainers have to emphasise repeatedly and boringly how they’re not disputing the result of the referendum.

My suspicion is that the old English prejudice against ‘poor losers’ – like the Germans after World War I – has something to do with this. Accept your defeat like a man. (Or a woman, but it was usually men then.) You knew the rules; you can’t change them now that the final whistle has been blown. That’s the spirit of the game. Complaining is just ‘not cricket’.

Unfortunately there are things that are just a little bit more important than cricket. (I never thought I’d find myself writing that.) Britain’s relationship with her neighbours is one. The Europeans don’t play cricket, after all. Surely they’d let us have another go?

PS (Monday): there’s an excellent argument in favour of a re-run on https://www.nchlondon.ac.uk/2016/10/14/letter-professor-ac-grayling-650-mps-urging-parliament-debate-eu-referendum-outcome-12-october-2016/.

Back to the UK. I find travelling very tiring. (I can’t wait for them to invent that instantaneous transporter they had in Star Trek.) So, no time and little energy to blog. And nothing new to say about the tragedies and craziness around us – Alleppo, Trump, and so on. Is this the ‘worst of times’?

In the meantime here’s a link to my current LRB piece. (I didn’t choose the headline. It sounds like Trump.)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n20/bernard-porter/send-more-blondes