Porter’s Pensées

Having resisted commenting on the Clinton-Trump ‘debate’, on the grounds of lack of expertise, I may have something to contribute based on my long historical view. For me, the telling episode in the debate came when Trump justified certain anti-social financial chicaneries of his on the grounds of ‘That’s called business’. Which confirms the analysis I made of his movement (and others) in a post in March this year, as simply the climax of the inexorable march in the world (? let’s hope not) of the capitalist juggernaut. Here’s the link: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/03/10/trump-the-long-view/. Get it up. I think it’s OK, possibly important, and an example of how a sense of history can help.

I’ve changed both the title and the design of this blogsite. (Ben, the ‘Happiness Engineer’ (sic) at WordPress.com, was very helpful.) The ‘Search’ facility should be useful. And I now have a ‘domain’: ‘bernardjporter.com’, though I don’t yet know what to do with it.

Yes, we woke up at 3 a.m. (Swedish time) to watch The Debate. And yes, we were predictably appalled by Trump, and – in my case less predictably – impressed by Clinton. But I have nothing original to contribute here to the debate about The Debate; no points that aren’t already being made in this morning’s papers. I’ve studied American history, and have always taken a deep, almost obsessive, interest in American politics (I was there for the 2008 Election), and I think I have some understanding of Trump’s popular appeal. Obviously by any objective and intelligent understanding Hillary ‘won’ last night, and by some distance. But how well that will play with the American electorate – her cool female reason against his male blustering and bullying – I can’t tell. America is an alien place. Our transatlantic cousins? Hardly.

I try to restrict my comments on this blog to things I have special knowledge or experience of. On the USA, I’m just one of the boring, predictable, liberal-intellectual crowd.

Capitalism may be a lot of good things, but one thing it isn’t is creative. It almost never originates new or great things; only develops them, at best, or exploits them, for the profit of others, and often arguably to the detriment of the creations themselves. Football (soccer) is an example. Capitalists didn’t create it; ordinary folk, entirely independently of the capitalist system and ethos, did. But then, when it became popular, and capitalists saw the possibility of a quick buck in it, it was wrested away from its creators, and turned into something very different. That’s what all the fuss about West Ham’s move to Stratford – see my last post but three – is about.

That particular cause is now lost. But it’s worth considering some of the more general implications of it. One is that, even in order for capitalism to thrive, certain aspects of life must be kept clear of it. Material necessity isn’t (always) the ‘mother of invention’. Too often it’s its enemy. How many great scientists, artists, writers, composers, writers, even footballers, have been motivated originally by the profit motive? It follows that if capitalism can’t create, and indeed is inimical to creation, we still need to have, even in as capitalistic a society as we have now, areas entirely free from it, in order for the seeds of creativity, invention, art and (I would say) scholarship to flourish in, before they are snatched away. The goose must be protected from the factory farmer in order to be enabled to lay its golden eggs. Otherwise capitalism will find itself with nothing worthwhile to exploit.

That’s the simple capitalist case for not subjecting universities, public service broadcasting, and every other area of genuine creativity, to the ‘laws of the market’. There are of course other and perhaps better reasons. But capitalists work on the principle of selfish material advantage, so maybe this argument might get through to them where the others wouldn’t.

(PERSONAL)

Since starting this blog I’ve been diagnosed – well, not exactly diagnosed, as there’s no test for it, but all the symptoms fit – with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, otherwise known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME); which is why I find it hard to get up in the mornings – I never used to – and why there’s no chance of my ever writing another book. This blog has now turned into a therapy for me, to keep my old mind active, without needing to do any hard work. I’m living off the fat I have built up over the course of the twelve books and dozens of scholarly articles I’ve published since 1968, and what I read in the papers. If I don’t write regularly I’ll fade into pleasant oblivion. There’s no need for you to read it.

ME used to be dismissed as an excuse for laziness. In my case I suspect it was triggered by a tick bite I got on Svartsö two years ago; the one that can give you Lyme disease. A dangerous country, Sweden. Democratic, but dangerous.

In the meantime, Kajsa has been cruelly cut off from all formal contact – including her email address – with the university she has served for thirty years. ‘Is there life after academia?’ she asks. Perhaps together we could set up a new university for the tired and the rejected.

The coverage of the British Labour leadership campaign in the Swedish press has been astonishing. I don’t remember a Swedish general election getting this kind of attention in any British newspapers, let alone a mere internal party squabble. The reporting has been full and – so far as I can gather – fair; far more so than in most of our British papers. If you want to read a really informative and unbiased account of the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon, you should go to Dagens Nyheter. On the other hand, I’m not quite sure the Swedes really understand what’s going on.

That’s because their political culture is so very different from ours. From here (Sweden) British affairs appear exotic, exciting, even a little mad. I’m sure that’s why the press here dwells on them so much; not – surely – because Britain is still important, like the USA, which also, of course, gets a lot of coverage. Swedish politics is protected from the internal party battles that have riven both Labour and the Conservatives recently, by its proportional system of voting, which enables the party situation to be more flexible, and which encourages compromise. There are two left-wing parties here, the Social Democrats and the Vänster (old Left), which would accommodate both of the warring tribes in our Labour party, while still giving each electoral influence in line with their popular support. (See https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/the-soul-of-british-politics/.) So a row in either party over its ‘soul’, which is what we are going through, is almost unimaginable, or at least would be far less serious and damaging than the one that British Labour is going through now. (Having said that, there is some soul-searching going on in Miljöpartiet, or the Greens. But they’re quite small.)

As well as this, Sweden’s politicians are more boring. Jimmy Åkesson, for example, the leader of the Sweden Democrats, their equivalent of UKIP, is a smartly dressed young man who wouldn’t look out of place behind a bank counter; with nothing like the panache of our Nigel. Swedes can hardly credit that people like Farage and Boris are active and even influential in British politics. Even Jeremy Corbyn must look a little under-dressed. For a nation whose public life lacks colour, I would say, Britain fills the gap; the small, silly parts of their souls that they might like to express themselves, but are too polite to.

Lastly, the Swedes don’t have our press. That’s the feature of our politics and society that shocks them the most: not only the rank sensationalism and near-pornography of the tabloids, which have no real equivalent in Aftonbladet and Expressen, but the blatant propagandizing of all our papers; their use by their proprietors as mouthpieces of one particular ideology or another, usually shockingly unbalanced, and with any regard for the truth being – at best – secondary. Of course Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet are directed to certain readerships, mirroring their political preferences to an extent (Svenska Dagbladet is more Conservative), but it’s well-nigh impossible to detect this from their reportage. (Kajsa and I – both of us Lefties – take both of them.) They all – even the tabloids – have what we would regard as ‘high’ Kultur sections. So you can see why we (the Brits) appear so fascinating to the Swedes. It’s our daring, our lack of political correctness, our colourfulness, our sheer awfulness in many ways.

This, however, isn’t why they’re interested in Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn would not seem particularly exotic in a Swedish context. His policies are pretty mainstream, for a Social Democratic country. ‘Momentum’, vilified in the British press as a Trotskyite entryist conspiracy, resembles a score of Swedish grass-roots rörelsen (social movements) in the past, out of which most Swedish parties and policies have grown. This is natural to a country that has accepted ‘bottom-up’ (or if you like, ‘democratic’) politics for generations. The fascination with Corbyn lies not in his politics, but in the fact that he is so omstridd, or viciously beleaguered, in his own country, instead of being calmly accepted and reasonably debated with, as he would be here.

But then here they don’t appear to have the patronizing view of politics we Brits have, or at any rate to the same extent: of a country needing to be run by an ‘establishment’, of whatever party; in other words, by governments set over it, albeit with the people being graciously allowed to choose which particular establishment they want to knuckle under every few years. That of course is one of the things that Jeremy is challenging. If he succeeds, who knows? Britain might become a little bit more like Sweden. Hurrah.

‘Where are you off to then?’ That’s the taxi driver yesterday, taking me and my suitcase to Hull station. ‘Sweden,’ I reply, as I have so many times before. The reaction is always the same. Either (a) ‘isn’t it cold there?’; or (b) ‘isn’t it expensive?’ I try to explain that (a) yes, it is cold, in winter, but in summer it can be warmer than in England and for longer during the day; and (b) it’s only expensive if you buy a lot of booze and eat in restaurants, where they pay their staff a decent wage. Other stuff costs roughly the same. And is usually better. In any case it depends on the exchange rate – rather bad for me just now, as it happens, due to the Brexit vote. But they don’t believe me.

I’m doing my best for the Swedish tourist industry – take note, Migrationsverket: I’ve not heard back from you yet about my citizenship application – but to little avail. Maybe if I confirmed their other stereotypes – for example, about the country being full of leggy blondes willing to have sex with them (the men) at the drop of a hat – I might do better. But then my taxi-drivers would be so disappointed – and probably arrested for harassment – when they got here. Perhaps it’s just as well. I don’t want a lot of British hoi polloi coming over and spoiling the place for me.

My historical centre of gravity, so to speak, is the 1890s, and has involved research into the London Metropolitan Police; so I’ve been a keen follower of the current BBC2 series Ripper Street, starring Matthew Macfadyen as Inspector Reid, a fictional detective in Whitechapel around then. It takes a strong stomach to watch it; but historically it’s pretty accurate, both in its general atmosphere, and in its impressive knowledge of the main themes, mores and characters of that period, which are skilfully mined for its plot lines. There are a few things that jar on me, like the modern slang that occasionally appears among the show’s otherwise very correct-sounding dialogue – I’m pretty sure people didn’t use the words ‘wanker’ and ‘pisshead’ then, for example. And it sometimes appears slightly anachronistic in the way it pursues themes that seem to be redolent of the present day. But I’d recommend it wholeheartedly, both for entertainment, and for serious instruction in British social history.

Monday night’s episode was a joy to me personally, because the plot (a gruesome murder) centres around the Thames Ironworks factory in the East End; and in particular its football team. Thames Ironworks FC, of course, was the original name of my beloved West Ham United, the ‘Hammers’; hence the chant, still heard today, of ‘Come on you Irons!’ In this episode, we see them playing, convincingly – i.e. roughly but skilfully – in late-19^th century strip. The plot involves the murder of one of its star players – with a hammer. It also features the Arsenal. But I don’t want to give too much away.

As well as this, it touches tangentally on the topic of the broader social significance of football at that time, about which I’ve posted elsewhere (http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/12/22/bernard-porter/like-the-ancient-romans/#more-20273): namely its importance as a factor forging working-class identity. In the course of it, the team’s trainer shows Reid around the works. It used to be run almost co-operatively, he claims, with the men having an input through their Unions. (I’m not sure if that’s historically true, but it serves to make the writers’ contemporary point.) Now all that is coming to an end. The masters have taken control away from the men. They’re trying to break the unions, ‘prising the men away from their fellow men’. ‘But this,’ he says, pointing to the players on the field. ‘The football. They can’t take that away from us.’

But of course, in the long run ‘they’ have. The latest stage of this theft or bourgeoisification or capitalist exploitation of football (or whatever you want to call it) is the recent physical removal of West Ham United FC from its cultural roots in Thames Ironworks country, contrary to most of its fans’ wishes, to its huge posh new ex-Olympic stadium in Stratford. Did the writers of this episode of Ripper Street have this in mind? I’ve not visited the new ground yet – I plan to soon – but I’m informed that the ‘atmosphere’ there, both in the ground itself and its environs, is flat by comparison with the old Upton Park. (I bade farewell to that in another post: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/05/11/bernard-porter/goodbye-to-boleyn/.) Who knows: this may have something to do with West Ham’s results so far this season, which are pretty dire.

(A shortened version of this is on the LRB blog: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/09/21/bernard-porter/on-ripper-street/.)

*

Off back to Stockholm tomorrow, where Hammarby SK are my local club. I went once, and was surprised to hear shouts of ‘wanker’, ‘pisshead’ and the like from the terraces behind me. No, not British visitors, but fat Swedes – yes, there are some – who had obviously learned the language of football hooliganism from us. Another thing to make one proud to be British.

A number of leading Brexiteers are currently floating the idea that perhaps we could compensate for our (likely) exclusion from the European Single Market by forging an alternative single market with our old Commonwealth ‘friends’. This harks back to late Victorian times, and in particular to Joseph Chamberlain’s scheme for an ‘Imperial Tariff Union’ or ‘Zollverein’ (modelled on the German), intended to shore up Britain’s waning world power, which came a cropper in the election of 1906 – the problem was that it would require imposing tariffs in order to be able to give Commonwealth countries exemptions – but was partially achieved after Britain abandoned universal free trade between the wars. The proposal to restore Commonwealth preference today looks like a reversion to that: to the bad old days of the British Empire, which the most reactionary old Blimps in the Tory party – and younger Blimps, like Boris – have always hankered for. So it should, of course, be rejected out of court.

But wait a minute. The Commonwealth as it evolved between the Wars wasn’t only a Blimpish thing. Anti-imperialists came to support the idea too, and indeed to wax quite enthusiastic about it, as an alternative to imperialism; the idea being, of course, that all the colonies of the Empire would become truly self-governing soon, and then agree voluntarily to be associated with Britain – the ‘mother country’ – on fully equal terms. That’s what happened, indeed, after World War II. If you were a ‘Commonwealth man’, as I was, it certainly did not mean that you were an imperialist. Just the opposite, in fact.

Among ‘Commonwealth men’ in the 1970s there was a great deal of reluctance to join the ‘Common Market’, as it was then, on the grounds, not of imperial nostalgia, but of true internationalism, which we thought was expressed by the Commonwealth better. One of the things that attracted us about the latter was its deliberate multiracialism (today more often called ‘multiculturalism’), by comparison with which the new European union appeared too much like a ‘white man’s club’. I can’t remember whether that was a crucial factor in my case when it came to the referendum of 1975, but it was certainly one that I took into account.

When we joined the Common Market, far more of our trade was done with the Commonwealth than with continental Europe, which is one of the things that made our adjustment more difficult in the years ahead. Australia and New Zealand felt rejected and betrayed. Patterns of trade in the world are very different these days, so it doesn’t follow that restoring our ties with our ex-colonies would redress that imbalance immediately. If we’re forced to go in that direction, however, there would be a certain historical logic to it; and a number of idealistic arguments that could be made out for it – mainly that true ‘internationalism’ should embrace the whole world, and all colours of people, and not just one pale pink continent.

To make it really idealistic, however, we should need to include African and Asian nations in our new Zollverein; and permit freedom of movement among them: as was the case, at least theoretically, at the Empire’s height. I’m not sure that the new Commonwealth men (and women) would swallow that.

Yesterday Lauri Love failed in his appeal against extradition to the USA on computer hacking charges, despite his suffering from Asperger’s syndrome and being a strong suicide risk. (See https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/sep/16/computer-activist-lauri-love-loses-appeal-against-us-extradition.)

All I can add to this from my historical knowledge is the observation, which may or may not be pertinent, that this would not have been possible in Victorian times. The Victorians were always very reluctant to extradite anyone for any reason, especially if they had doubts about the judicial or penal system of the country that had sought the extradition; or if the crime could be classed as ‘political’. (Even political assassins could not be removed.) I’ve written about this before, in connexion with the Assange extradition process: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/02/11/bernard-porter/the-victorians-wouldn’t-have-stood-for-it/. Love would almost certainly have escaped on these grounds then.

The Assange case came under the terms of the ‘European Arrest Warrant’: a very dodgy and potentially oppressive piece of legislation, which is now attracting a great deal of opposition both country- and Europe-wide. For a start, it doesn’t require any burden of proof. People can be extradited on the mere say-so of a foreign official. (Maybe after Brexit we can opt out?) Lauri Love, on the other hand, is the victim of a particular and very unequal extradition treaty between the UK and the USA. In both cases the British government’s main motive for allowing them was to cosy up to foreign governments. This is one area in which the Victorians were immeasurably more liberal than we are.

Interestingly, one (pseudonymous) commentator on my original lrb blog post inferred from it that I must be a member of the BNP. Odd.