Porter’s Pensées

‘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.

In the Observer this morning Barbara Ellen wonders how the Labour Party, under Corbyn, has turned into the ‘stinking, slippery well’ it is now; ‘a hot-desking playpen for conceited, clueless backbench-lifers, peddling everything from pungent whiffs of anti-Semitism, sexism and other forms of bullying and discrimination to meaningless “neo-hipster” drivel, delivered with sub-zero political acumen?’

Eh? Is that what it looks like to our metropolitan commentariat? I must say that out here in the sticks (Hull) I don’t recognize this description at all. Looking over from Stockholm, my other home, Corbyn’s policies seem pretty much in the main European tradition of moderate social democracy. Listening to his speeches and interventions in the House of Commons, he cuts an admirably polite, rational figure. I don’t know about his close supporters, who I imagine must include a sprinkling of anti-Semites and hipsters among them – doesn’t any political party have its minority of crazies? just look at the Tories – but I’ve never met any of them, in fifty years’ association with the Labour Party, including in my newly regenerated local branch today. I doubt the anti-semitic charge in particular. (See https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/the-political-and-the-personal/ – the last bit – and https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/05/04/antisemitism-again/.) That really is the vilest of smears, and surely must be cynically intended as such.

But whose picture is the more accurate one? I’ve spent most of my life as a critical, moderate and thoughtful Labour member (with a big gap for Blair), and as a student and teacher of past British politics among other things. So I have both experience and expertise in this area. Barbara Ellen, who confesses she has always voted Labour, but ‘automatically’ and ‘tribally’, is expert only as a newspaper columnist, writing (before the Observer) for – this is from her Wiki entry – ‘NME, The Times, Mail on Sunday, Elle, Marie Claire, Grazia, Loaded, GQ and Mojo.’ I suppose it might be considered snobbish to cite these titles against her. But as she inveighs elsewhere against people writing from ignorance, I think it’s fair comment. Ellen’s diatribe mirrors much of what is written in the press about Corbyn these days, not least in ignoring completely his policies, which are after all why he has got where he is. There’s not a single word about those in this piece; nothing but superficial impressions of him and his followers, of the kind that I imagine would go down very well in Elle, Marie Claire, Grazia, Loaded, GQ and Mojo. And which may – and this is the point – quite accurately reflect the opinions of what she calls ‘people like myself’, whoever they are. The question is: how many ‘people like her’ are there? Does her portrayal of Corbyn’s Labour party typify either the Labour Party itself, or the wider public view of it?

I’m sure it doesn’t do the first; but I suspect, sorrowfully, that it might well reflect the views of a good slice of the British public. They after all have been subjected to these kinds of blind, angry, superficial, misleading, partial, venomous and unsubstantiated attacks on Corbyn for a year now: from most of the public media, including, regrettably, the Guardian stable, and even from some of his own MPs. (The Tories don’t need to waste their ammunition.) It must have got through. The only thing that might inoculate them against the infection is the disenchantment of a huge number of them – Ukippers as well as natural Centre-Lefties – with the ‘Establishment’ which they see as the source of the disease. One day, perhaps after a Brexit-induced crisis, when they come to realize that the Daily Mail and the Sun are in fact pillars of that Establishment, rather than the champions of the ordinary bloke and bloke-ess they pretend to be, others could join them. Whether Barbara Ellen will be among them, I somehow doubt.

There are historical precedents for (moderate) radicals like Corbyn facing similar ordeals by fire to this one, yet coming through. The Chartists provoked the most awful backlash among the propertied, but won out in the end. The same is true of the suffragettes. The subjects of my doctoral research, late Victorian and Edwardian anti-imperialists, attracted exactly the kind of venom that Ellen is dishing out here to the Corbynites (see http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/08/07/bernard-porter/whos-a-dinosaur-now/), but found the tide turning in their favour quite shortly afterwards. I imagine that very few of us today would regard franchise reform, votes for women and decolonization as beyond the pale; the products of a ‘stinking, slippery well’. One thing that History teaches is that circumstances – indeed whole climates of opinion, zeitgeists, general assumptions about what is desirable and possible – can change quite radically in comparatively short times, leaving the superficial journalist’s narrow view of his or her own time stranded high and dry on the shore.

My (conditional) support for Corbyn is based on my hope – no more than that – that this is what we may be seeing right now, on a world-wide scale. Only very recently the need for ‘austerity’ was a ‘given’ in European politics, almost unquestioned and unquestionable. That assumption has collapsed very quickly indeed in just a few dramatic years. Even Theresa May is giving it short shrift now. The Labour Left, of course, has always opposed it. So Corbyn, despite his ‘throwback’ reputation, may in fact be swimming with the current of history. In which case he may be seen in a few years’ time to have positioned his party well. But you need a long view, longer than Barbara Ellen’s, and some optimism – more in fact than I have – to be confident of that just yet.

When John Profumo was forced to resign from Macmillan’s government in 1963 it wasn’t because he’d had an affair with a call girl, but because he’d lied about it. Lying was considered to be far more reprehensible than illicit sex. That was probably just as well, in view of the sexual shenanigans we know many eminent politicians got up to in the 1960s, which were generally hidden from the public view however by a more respectful (or deferential) press. Today, illicit sex by public figures is probably even more widely tolerated than it was then – and of course a lot of what was ‘illicit’ then isn’t illicit any more, like homosexuality, thankfully – unless it involves really nasty stuff, like paedophilia, or ‘harrassment’. That’s all to the good.

Lying, however, seems to me to have lost much of the opprobrium that used to attach to it. No-one in the present government has actually been sacked, or even reprimanded, for the lies they told during the European referendum campaign, like the ‘£350 million a week going to the EU’ that was plastered on the side of the Brexiteers’ battle bus, and remained there even after it was revealed as a falsehood; and the many others trotted out on both sides of that debate. Indeed, Boris Johnson was even promoted. Jeremy Corbyn was about the only participant in that debate who didn’t resort to blatant exaggerations to bolster his case for ‘Remain (on the whole)’; for which he has been almost universally castigated since then for not arguing his party’s case strongly enough. But this is the point: to argue more strongly would have meant his telling lies. This was the aspect of his advocacy I most admired, according as it did with my own reasons for voting his way (I’m not a Euro-fanatic either), and more likely, I’d have thought, to persuade thoughtful people to vote Remain than apocalyptic visions of death and destruction that would, we were told by its more forceful advocates, be bound to follow Brexit. It’s one of my reasons for supporting Corbyn more generally. He may make mistakes, but he doesn’t tell deliberate untruths. Unfortunately, that’s one of the things that make him seem old-fashioned; a throwback to the days of honour – ‘trust me’, ‘I cannot tell a lie’, ‘a gentleman’s word is his bond’ – now long past. Admittedly, men and women told porkies then, often huge ones; but they were usually reviled for it when they were found out. Today that attitude seems innocent, even naive. Of course people – especially politicians, and estate agents – lie. It’s expected. Which is why parliament and parliamentarians are not trusted any more.

That last effect explains why earlier – in the 19^th century, say – so much emphasis was placed on probity in public affairs. It covered not only politics, but also industry and finance, personal relations, and even policing. It’s why, as I showed in Plots and Paranoia, policemen were not allowed to go ‘undercover’ – that is, implicitly lie about their identity – for most of that century. Of course, again, some did, but then, if revealed as ‘spies’, they became universal hate-figures. (The notorious early 19^th-century ‘Oliver the Spy’ was one of them.) If Britain’s rulers and their agents acquired the reputation of being systematically deceitful, they would lose the respect of their subjects, on which much of their authority depended. The result of that was almost bound to be popular disobedience – ‘why should we obey them?’ – and an encouragement to deceit more generally. That’s the situation we’ve reached just now. No-one trusts governments, which removes the moral sanction from obedience to authority; and an awful lot of people seem to think that what’s good for the gander is good for the little ducks too: that lying isn’t really serious. Instead the rule of life seems to be that you are entitled to say or do what you can get away with – no more. And getting away with lying is far easier now than it used to be.

The prime example of this in today’s world, of course, is Donald Trump, whose almost daily lies are notorious, and are generally uncovered straightaway, but with no damage being done to him as a result; indeed, if anything, the reverse. That’s because his falsehoods have a certain panache, which appears to be a quality admired more by his followers than honesty; and because they very often chime in with the latters’ prejudices, which are not always based on ‘facts’. This plugs into a widespread popular American discourse of anti-intellectualism, described brilliantly in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas (2005), and, long before that, in Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1966); which systematically devalues expertise (that is, knowing what you’re talking about), as elitist, unnecessarily complicating, East Coast (in America), and the opposite of ‘down to earth’ (whatever that is). That the British Right may be drifting into this position was suggested by Michael Gove’s notorious dismissal of ‘experts’, wholesale, during the ‘Brexit’ debate. He might just as well have dismissed ‘truth’.

I must think some more about the underlying historical reasons for this. The rise of aggressive advertising from the late 19^th century onwards must be one of them: see HG Wells’s novel Tono-Bungay (1909). Amoral capitalist speculation will be another: see Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875). Yes, the novelists spotted it! Since then we have had the new profession of ‘Public Relations’ (David Cameron’s first job) to encourage at the very least the embellishment of the truth for gain; TV ‘reality’ shows, which glorify bad behaviour; and an era of increasingly more desperate competition in both private and corporate life, which encourages – even forces – people to cut corners with the truth. I’ve noticed this even in my sheltered academic career: applicants for jobs sexing up their CVs, and university departments manipulating and embellishing their teaching and research records in order to come out high in government ‘quality assessment’ tables, to attract funding. (Gosh, I could tell some tales!) That, of course, is a direct violation of the whole purpose and spirit of universities. The danger will come when this sullies the purity of the ‘expertise’ of which they are, by and large, the main repository.

Mostly, it has to do with money. So – to look at it more generally – it may be a particular function of late capitalism. Capitalism is intrinsically amoral – which is not to say that it always has to be immoral, even in its own interests – and so will usually take the more profitable path. If this involves downright lying, and that is accepted by its customers, because it has come to be seen as ‘normal’, then what’s to stop it?

What stopped – or at least controlled – it in the past were three things. They were Christianity’s moral message; the public schools’ notion of ‘noblesse’ or ‘honour’; and working-class solidarity in trade unions. All of these trumped the capitalist ethos. Of course not all Christian sects, or public schools, especially now, or trade unions lived up to these ideals; but they were there. All three are in decline today. Which means that we’ll have to find other institutions to revive the values, or at least the ideals, of truth and honesty in public life. Corbyn can’t do it on his own.

It should be obvious that Britain’s present electoral system is an undemocratic mess. (I’ve posted on this before: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/.) This must be one of the reasons (though not the only one) why there is so little respect in the country at large for parliament, which in its turn fuels anti-democratic feeling, mainly of course on the Right but also on the far Left. (Further Left, that is, than Corbyn.) Much the same is true in the USA. Both countries have relatively low turn-outs at elections.

So we need to do something about it. I’d suggest the following five reforms for a start.

1. A House of Commons accurately reflecting the votes of the people as a whole. This could be achieved while still having locally-accountable MPs, by adopting the German electoral system, or some variant thereof: single-member constituencies, but with any imbalances corrected from a pool of extra, either popularly elected or party-nominated, candidates. See http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-election-system-explained-a-923243.html.
2. An acceptance of (a) a multiplicity of parties in the legislature; and (b) coalitions. That would be the probable effect of Reform no. 1. The advantages of multi-party coalitions – if the minority parties are doing their job properly: better that is than the Lib Dems in the last government – are that they reflect national opinion more accurately, and more fluidly; and are bound to curb the more extreme policies of the dominant parties.
3. State financial support for parties, based on membership, together with a ban – or at least a strict limit – on ‘private’ (which usually means corporate or trade union) funding.
4. A franchise based on citizenship, rather than registration, either individual or by household. That might do something to solve the well-known problem of the ‘missing voters’ – perhaps a million or more who, for various reasons, aren’t registered currently. See https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/16/britains-1m-missing-voters.
5. Impartial controls on party propaganda, simply to outlaw demonstrable propaganda falsehoods, by spokespeople, candidates, or in the press. Those Brexit ‘£350 millions a day’ buses would have to go.

Reform no. 1 (proportional representation) would solve the Labour Party’s present leadership difficulties at a stroke. At present too much is supposed to depend on who is elected leader of this monolith. Whichever candidate loses the contest is left out in the cold, without a home to go to. With a multiplicity of parties each with a real chance of at least sharing power, his faction could hive off and form another one. (Strictly this should be Owen Smith’s rebels, leaving the ‘old’ Labour Party to the Corbynites; but it doesn’t much matter which.) Then, after fighting the next election separately, they can decide whether they want to join a coalition with each other, and with other broadly like-minded minority parties, like the Greens. (This is how it works in Sweden.)

It would also give political activists, like those half-a-million Labour members – most of them new, young, idealistic and hopeful – a reasonable chance of being heard. Their enthusiasm needs to be harnessed. What will happen to it if it is once again frustrated by the system, and by the conventional establishment political discourse – i.e., comes a cropper against the hard ‘Westminster bubble’ – hardly bears thinking about: either a return to hopeless apathy; or a U-turn to the irrational and illiberal Right. That’s happened before – Mosley, Strachey, and the others who went from Labour to the BUF in the 1930s.

But of course there are powerful layers of prejudice and vested interest to be confronted, before any of this becomes possible.

It was Enoch Powell who famously claimed that ‘all political careers end in failure’. That’s probably not true in every case – it depends how you measure ‘failure’ – but it certainly is in Cameron’s. (He announced his resignation today as an MP.) Even historians are not necessarily very good at predicting the judgments of future generations of historians, but the mess he made of the ‘Brexit’ affair, leading – if nothing totally unpredictable intervenes – to Britain’s leaving the European Union against his advice, as well as its knock-on effects on other countries: a diplomatic and economic ground-shift if ever there was one – will surely be the legacy of his that is most written about. Historians can be unforgiving.

No-one is very surprised. We all knew that Cameron’s politics never had any ‘bottom’. Like Blair, but more so, he had no strong principles that one could detect, certainly none that appear to have motivated him; but had come into politics as a ‘career’ choice, like so many MPs these days (on all sides), and probably encouraged by the knowledge that he was born and bred to it. (That’s Eton for you.) His only previous job was in PR – presentation, nothing more. Like most of his ilk, he had no experience of what most people would regard as ‘real life’. He was a smooth operator – I always imagine that condom Steve Bell had him wearing over his head lubricated with KY Jelly – but totally superficial, without substance. His descent into political anonymity and obloquy is fully deserved, and would be welcomed if it weren’t for the damage he leaves behind.

What will he do next? There will be, of course, plenty of lucrative opportunities open to him, with his experience, rich friends and range of contacts. It will be interesting to see if he manages to out-corrupt Blair.

*

Moving to the other side of the pond, a question. If Clinton dropped out of the Presidential race because of illness, who would replace her? No-one, leaving the field clear for Trump? Her Vice-Presidential running mate? Or perhaps Bernie Saunders, who after all came a very respectable second in the primaries; who a number of polls published at that time predicted would stand a better chance than Hillary against Trump; and who might take over much of Trump’s blue-collar anti-Establishment, anti-globalization support.

Then, with a Corbyn-led Labour party winning the 2020 election, and a self-declared ‘socialist’ in the White House, we could have a transatlantic revolution: socialism in two countries, and the two most unlikely ones at that. (Dream on.)

Oh no, not Grammar schools again! (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/09/theresa-may-to-end-ban-on-new-grammar-schools#img-1.)

I know a bit about these, having been to one in the 1950s, and my father having been headmaster of an Essex Secondary Modern at the same time. I can confirm the sense of superiority it gave to us winners, and of failure felt by all the ‘losers’ – those who failed the ‘11+’ – which stayed with many of them throughout their lives. Those who ‘achieved’ in one way or another despite this were true heroes. That a small minority did, was no excuse for demoralising the rest.

Dad naturally went into secondary moderns as a teacher because he himself was of that class. That was despite his winning a scholarship to a grammar school (in Chelmsford), which gave him his first step up the class ladder. (That’s probably what the Tories mean when they claim that Grammar schools encourage ‘social mobility’.) But then he only took a teaching diploma and a London External degree. Heads of Grammar schools were expected to have been to university.

I got the impression he ran his school well and creatively, putting on a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, for example, each year, and with some wonderful and inspiring teachers, many of whom who became my friends and mentors. Some of his pupils he managed to coach through the ‘13+’, a second chance of getting into a ‘good’ school. But the rest all knew they were ‘losers’. Most of them turned into ‘Essex girl’ and ‘Essex boy’, as we know them today.

I can’t see how you can have ‘selective’ schools without branding those who haven’t been selected as losers. The 11+ of course was a travesty as a true test of academic ability, skewed towards the middle classes and those whose parents could afford coaching, and based on very dodgy empirical evidence in any case. (Remember the Cyril Burt ‘IQ Test’ scandal?) It was obvious to all of us at the time – winners as well as losers – that it was actually intended to categorise and separate children by class. My parents didn’t want me sitting at a desk beside a lorry-driver’s boy. (No girls, at my school.) Which is why I’m not sure how Education Secretary Justine Greening’s idea to force her new Grammar schools to take 50% of their pupils from the poorest classes is going to go down with the posh parents of Kent and Buckinghamshire. That looks like a sop to Theresa May’s pretended ambition of freeing up social mobility; part of her initial ‘progressive’ rhetoric which I don’t think any of us quite believed at the time. As every expert is emphasising just now, including some high-placed Tory ones, Grammar schools are the very worst way of achieving equality and social mobility.

But of course they’re popular with nostalgic Tory backwoodspeople, going right back to the 1950s and ’60s, who need to believe – in view of her unreliable position on Brexit – that May really is ‘one of them’. After Grammar schools will come corporal punishment, spotted dick, and AA men saluting them from their motor bikes. (Ah, the good old days!) Many commentators expect this scheme to fail, if not in the Commons, then in the Lords. Good. For myself, I’m convinced that I’d have been a better person if I’d gone to a co-educational Comprehensive. As indeed my children are.

*

While on the subject of the 1950s: my piece on ‘1956’, which I posted here (https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/nostalgia/) because it had been squeezed out of the LRB, has now been taken up by the TLS. It should be there in 2-3 weeks.

Being an oldie, I’m often left far behind when it comes to contemporary popular culture. That’s a great disadvantage, I’ve found, when it comes to my weekly Pub Quiz, though luckily I have team-mates who seem to follow the pop music scene and soap operas more diligently than I. (I’m there for the History questions. Sometimes Kajsa comes along in case a question comes up on Sweden or feminism.)

It was a shock to me therefore when, TV channel-surfing one afternoon, I came across the ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’ for the first time. I’m afraid I was hooked, and have to admit that I have occasionally tuned into it deliberately since. (Afterwards I feel dirty.) It features – if you don’t know – various social inadequates slagging each other off in front of a studio audience, with a couple of heavies on hand in case it gets out of hand. Most of the ‘guests’ are young, many are single mothers or serial fathers, all seem to sleep around quite irresponsibly – one of the regular events is a DNA test to determine who the father of one of their babies is; most of the women and girls are outlandishly fat; the men – as it transpires – are abusive; many are thieves, sometimes from their own (fat) mothers; and nearly all of them are unemployed. They shout over one another – much of it ‘bleeped out’. They lie to the high heavens, until tested by Kyle’s ‘lie detector’: whose accuracy, incidentally, Kyle absolutely relies on. (Haven’t those things been shown to be a bit dodgy?) They’re usually ugly. Nearly all of them are on drugs. An extraordinary proportion of them are ex-cons. Kyle treats most of them appallingly, with no understanding of the conditions that probably made them like this. (One exception is drug addicts who genuinely want to kick their habits. He arranges expensive rehabilitation for them.) He’s particularly critical of the unemployed. ‘Then go and get a job then, you useless waste of space!’ They often leave in a worse and more violent state than they arrived in. It’s hard to understand why they agree – or, usually, volunteer – to come on his show, unless they’re paid well for it – drug money. It’s sickening. And fascinating.

Of course these are all marginal people, quite real, of course – I’ve met them in Hull – and may even be representative of a sub-culture in Britain. But they’re not typical, on the whole, of the ‘working classes’ they come from. It has occurred to me, however, that it’s shows like this, and Daily Mail accounts of this kind of behaviour, that form many Conservatives’ dominant image of the lower orders whom the last government seemed so intent on punishing. (See Owen Jones’s excellent Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, on this.) If, coming out of Eton and Oxford, this is our rulers’ only glimpse of hoi polloi – apart from faithful college retainers – I’m not surprised that they are as pitiless and vindictive as they are.

But I really must try to kick the habit. Perhaps there’s a rehabilitation centre for guilty ‘Kyle Show’ addicts that Jeremy could send me to.