Porter’s Pensées

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

Through the eyes of a modern liberal Marxist, almost everything that is happening in the world today – the reaction against globalism, harnessed to various brands of nationalism and racism – can be interpreted as a symptom of a late and declining capitalism, rapidly collapsing under the weight of its own ‘internal contradictions’. According to Marx, it’s the Left and the working classes who should be profiting from this. That may have been a mistake. Even if not, however, it appears we have to go through some crazy history first. Donald Trump is a marvellous embodiment of that, almost the quintessential ‘late’ capitalist, and a complete mess of internal contradictions in himself. He’s also terrifically entertaining, isn’t he, in a horror movie kind of way, so long as we have an ocean between us and him? I for one never anticipated that the approach to Götterdämmerung would be quite as colourful as this.

Otherwise I’ve been expecting something like this for years. This is a piece of mine from November 2009 giving some of my reasoning then. (It was for the LRB Blog: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2009/11/20/bernard-porter/come-back-karl/.)

*

Amid all this celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, I’m left wondering whether I was the only one to have jumped the other way at the time. It turned me into a Marxist. All my adult life before then I had thought that Marx had been wrong, for example in predicting that capitalism would need to get redder in tooth and claw before it was undermined by its internal contradictions. The Russian Revolution however had not occurred in the most advanced capitalist country, which is why, by my way of thinking, it could only be kept alive by tyranny – a premature baby in an incubator was the metaphor I liked to use. In the West it had been shown that enlightened capitalist societies could smooth away their own roughest edges, by taking on board social democracy, the welfare state, decolonisation and the like. All this seemed to put the kibosh on the old man’s gloomy prognostication of capitalism’s needing to get worse before it exploded, releasing us into a brave new socialist world that not even Marx could describe in detail (consistently with his belief that it was the material base that determined intellectual superstructures), and that I, for one, was not at all confident that I would come to like. Happy days.

Then came Thatcher, Reagan and 1989; smashing the incubator that was the only thing keeping the Communist weakling alive, and reversing the social democratic ‘advances’, as we had seen them, of fifty years. All this really did seem to be driven by underlying economic imperatives. (Thatcher and Reagan were only riding them.) Since then events have followed Marx’s closer predictions almost uncannily: globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, the undermining of democracy, the triumph of a capitalist discourse (railway ‘customers’ rather than ‘passengers’), the decline of socialist ideology, and a succession of capitalist crises, each worse than the last – but none of them as yet showing any sign of being the last. Come back Karl; all is forgiven. You were right. (Up to ‘the revolution’, that is. Maybe. For that, we’ll have to wait and see.)

As a historian, and fully aware of past British xenophobia – indeed, I’ve written about it – I can’t recall any other British government since the 17th century which had a policy of getting rid, in one way or another, of ‘aliens’ who were currently living in Britain. This is a notable, and worrying, ‘first’ for Theresa May.

Of course living in a foreign country broadens the mind. That’s why the organisation known as ‘Democrats Abroad’ (http://www.democratsabroad.org/) is making such huge efforts to register the American expatriate vote for the forthcoming presidential election. Its assumption is that US citizens living in Europe, say, are much less likely to vote for Trump than stay-at-home Americans. That must be right. For a start they must be affected by the almost universal derision that Trump receives in nearly all branches of the European media, where he is seen as not only wrong but also a clown. They’ll have spent much of their time being quizzed on him, almost incredulously, by their European friends. That will have been embarrassing for them. (I experience the same kind of discomfiture in Sweden, being quizzed about Farage.) Then, they will have come across ways of doing things – national health arrangements, for example – differently from how they do them in America, and found that they actually work. Thirdly, they’re probably less stupid, and almost certainly more open-minded, than most of Trump’s constituency. Travel can have this effect. And together they can muster many millions of votes. They could make the difference.

One thing that living abroad has done for me – apart from broadening my mind, I hope – is to give me another string to my professional bow. I used to be asked to review books on British imperialism and the secret services, my two main areas of historical expertise. Now I get books about Scandinavia, too. (See for example https://bernardjporter.com/2014/01/28/the-almost-nearly-perfect-people/.) I’ve just received Robert Ferguson, Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North, from the Literary Review. That will keep me pretty busy for at least a week, probably at the expense of my blogging duties. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

The Tories aren’t as stupid as they’re made out. In fact, part of their cleverness has always lain in pretending that they are dumber than they really are. That’s how they escaped the guillotine (or hangman’s noose) in French revolutionary times – who could believe that these British upper-class twits could be worth executing? – and why we still tolerate them today. Boris Johnson’s main value to the Tories is to perpetuate this cuddly, eccentric image, so we won’t get too angry with the obnoxious ones with the real power; like – in the last government – George Osborne.

Boris’s shielding of Osborne, however, couldn’t last for ever. People were beginning to suss the latter out for the gratuitously austerian Chancellor that he was. That was in line with the tide of world opinion, which was turning against extreme free market capitalism on several fronts.

So the Tories’ next cunning plan has been to disown Osborne and his policies, just like that. Osborne himself was dumped unceremoniously. There was to be no more obsession with ‘balancing the books’. State intervention, now, would facilitate growth. Housing would be taken out of the hands of the ‘market’ alone. Rogue capitalists and rich tax-avoiders would be clobbered. Social inequalities would be ironed out. The slogan now was a State – a State, mark you – that works for everyone, not just for the fortunate few: the implication being, of course, that the previous government, Cameron’s, which Teresa May had been part of, had only worked for the toffs. As Cameron’s successor as Tory leader (and as prime minister), May seems to be embarking on a total makeover for the party that she herself once castigated as being perceived, at least, as the ‘nasty’ one. This could mark a political revolution as remarkable as any that New Labour (now Old Labour) would have brought about. And that without a single vote being cast – on this issue, at least. (The Brexit vote, and the political chaos that that unleashed, obviously played its part.)

A number of questions arise from this. The first is, can she keep it up? It’s easy to spell out wonderful ideals, but then also to stumble, in part because of circumstances beyond the idealists’ control. Look at Obama. That is, if we can credit that May really is an idealist, and not just a cynical manipulator of phrases, for party political gain. Will her more Right-wing backbenchers and rich backers be content to travel this new road? I imagine her new xenophobic rhetoric (below) might help. The Nasties will love that.

Secondly: where does it leave the Labour Party? Many of May’s new aims and objectives have been taken right out of Jeremy Corbyn’s book. That leaves Labour with hardly a single original progressive policy to stand on. It’s going to find the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, a less easy target than the monstrous Osborne. With its (ill-deserved) reputation for financial inefficiency, that could well hold Labour back. And then there’s the ‘immigration’ thing to factor in.

That is the Conservatives’ really clever stroke, of course. Opinion is fairly widespread already – it’s what boosted the Brexit vote – that people’s jobs, houses, school places and chances of being treated in British hospitals have been undermined by mass immigration in recent years. It is probably not true; but the new government’s sympathetic response to it – wanting to replace foreign doctors by Brits, to force employers to reveal numbers of immigrant workers, and so on – will feed and boost this prejudice. Disaffected ex-Labour voters will feel they’re being ‘listened to’ at last. That also spells danger for Labour.

The nationalist tone of much of the rhetoric coming from the Conservative camp just now suggests another kind of danger. As a self-proclaimed ‘citizen of the world’, though still a fond Englishman (and soon a Swede, I hope), I resented and feared her slight on my kind of internationalist: ‘a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere’. I’m alarmed by the physical attacks taking place against foreigners on English streets just now, which have proliferated greatly since Brexit. If May and her government are going to play that ‘nasty’ card over the next few years, it could be dangerous not only for the Labour party, but for the country, and even for the world; for this new exclusionary nationalism is not, of course, confined to us.

This is exactly the combination of appeals which has given rise to fascist movements in the past. Hitler was popular because he purported to be both a nationalist and a socialist (Nazionalsocialismus). Mussolini did the same. Donald Trump and Marine le Pen seem to be going down this road. It should be said that it doesn’t have to lead to Fascism. Way back in British history, Disraeli’s appeal to working-class voters was similar: in his case it was ‘social reform’ allied to ‘patriotism’. Let’s hope Theresa May’s nationalism goes no further than her illustrious Conservative predecessor’s did. She’s obviously not stupid; in fact she’s proving herself to be very canny. But the danger is there. It may depend on how Brexit goes. And we’re not there yet, of course.

I’ve just watched an entire Trump speech on my i-phone (Manheim, Pennsylvania, October 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY89pjXa-EU). Yes, pity me. It lasted over an hour but could have been boiled down to a minute: ‘Make America great again’, ‘Crooked Hillary’, and ‘Me, me, me’. Yet the audience was apparently huge (we weren’t shown it), and yelled its approval ecstatically (we could hear that). Clips on TV news don’t quite convey the monotonous flavour of it: monotonous, but also mesmeric. It reminded me of minimalist music. There was no serious argument, nothing substantial, quite a few straight lies, a lot of cheap jibes, and repetitions, especially of words and phrases he knew would get his audience’s most poisonous juices flowing: Obama, Clinton, Wall Street, Washington, Mexicans, the intellectual elite.… But you’ll know all that.

My first reaction, as an intellectual elitist, was predictable. So perhaps was my second: which was to wonder what has gone wrong with my beloved USA to render such a monstrous candidate, and his popularity, possible? Surely it can’t be only the effect of late-stage capitalism (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/03/10/trump-the-long-view/)?

My third reaction was perhaps a little more worrying. What does this tell us about democracy? If Trump wins the presidential election, it will undoubtedly be democratically. If there is any electoral gerrymandering in this contest, as there probably was in George W’s, it will come from Trump’s opponents. (In the Manheim speech, he already prepared us for that.) A majority of the American people, or of those who bothered to vote, would have wanted him to win. They may have been stupid, misled, even cheated, but their will would have prevailed. So there can be no complaints.

For my part, this will only confirm the doubts I have had about ‘democracy’ for many years. I’ve never been an uncritical supporter of the idea, as so many others are. I’ve always rated good government higher than self-government, so long as that good government embraces fairness, justice, tolerance, peace, equality, opportunity, and a string of other ‘progressive’ qualities that I would place higher on my list of political desiderata than ‘democracy’ per se. In principle, I would prefer to live under a liberal autocracy than an oppressive democracy, if this were possible. Of course the choice is never as stark and simple as this; but I admit to a smidgeon of regret at the departure of tyrannical regimes which at least made an effort to maintain economic equality (the USSR), or gender equality (Saddam’s Iraq. Or so they say). The ‘democracies’ that allow exploitative capitalism, or the subjection of women to a religious majority, appeal to me less. I might have said that as one of Britain’s colonial subjects in the 1950s, if I’d known about some of the home-grown tyrannies that would replace Britain’s over the next twenty years. (I didn’t, because I didn’t foresee that, and I was a principled anti-imperialist at the time.)

The democrat’s answer to this, of course, is that democracy is more likely to implement these other progressive values than autocracy and colonialism are. That rests on a faith on the inherent progressiveness and rationality of human nature, which will always apparently rise to the surface when people are given control over their own affairs. It’s this, I’m afraid, that I can’t quite credit. When I hear the opinions of some people, and particularly Americans – if only because they seem more willing to air their prejudices (I’ve given an extraordinary example in an earlier post: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/22/btl/) – I rather doubt any people’s inherent goodness and rationality. Trump’s support confirms this. This makes democracy a very unreliable guarantor of liberal political virtue. It may be the least bad one, as (I think) Churchill said once. But with men like Trump around, we can’t rely on it. That might be taken as a defence of our own, British, highly un-democratic upper-class dominated political system, serving, as it does, to temper the excesses of the mob. Disliking Farageism as I do – our equivalent to Trumpery – I can see some point in that. But it’s a painful one.

The last time that people in Britain – some of them, at any rate – got seriously exercised about ‘inequality’, as opposed to simple ‘poverty’, was a hundred years ago. The key work then – the rough equivalent of Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (2010) and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality (2012) today – was Leo Chiozza Money’s Riches and Poverty (1905), which purported to show that 87% of private property in Britain was owned by 2.25% of the population, with the remainder – nearly 40 million people – having to make do with 13% of the national wealth. That’s much in line with what is claimed today. For Edwardian socialists the wealth gap will have come as no surprise. Chiozza Money’s great contribution, however, was to quantify it. And he wasn’t a socialist, but a passionate free trader, and a Liberal MP.

That greater equality could be espoused by economic Liberals in the 1900s may have had something to do with the fact that inequality, at least to this extent, wasn’t seen as a necessary concomitant of the free market. One of the great gurus of market economics, John Stuart Mill, actually believed that it would have the opposite effect, ironing out the inequalities which he and his kind tended to associate with feudal privilege. If that didn’t happen eventually, he wrote in the second edition of his Principles of Political Economy (1848), he for one would favour socialism. He was as good as his word, declaring his conversion (privately) in 1871. (Not many people know that.) It was this supposed convergence between free marketism and broad social equality that enabled most nineteenth century Liberals to embrace political as well as economic liberalism. Today of course the two are opposites. The final separation took place during the ‘Great Reaction’ of the 1980s, and Thatcher’s ideology of ‘the free economy in a strong’ that is, illiberal, ‘state’. Capitalists now usually regard inequality as a positive good: ‘incentives’, ‘trickle down’, and all that.

But the tensions between that and the general good were already beginning to be discerned in the 1900s. The British economy was declining, relative to others, and becoming more and more dependent on banking, finance and cheap colonial markets to shore it up. Living standards for the mass of people were no longer rising, as in free market logic they were supposed to. Only the very rich were gaining, sometimes through obvious corruption – it was a great age for financial scandals – and, what was widely considered to be more shocking, flaunting their wealth in the faces of the poor. Mr Toad in The Wind and the Willows (1908) is a personification (or toadification) of this; bringing nemesis in the shape of the takeover of his mansion by the ‘Wild Wooders’ (stoats and weasels), who are obviously meant to represent the working classes. (Kenneth Graham was a banker in his former life.) Interestingly, Toad and his friends manage to win Toad Hall back by digging a tunnel beneath it and surprising the proles; which could be seen to represent the subterranean MI5, which was formally set up just afterwards, and used against the Wild Wooders in real life.

The tunnellers however didn’t have it entirely their own way in early twentieth century Britain. The working classes had their trade unions, growing in economic and political power, with the set-backs (like the Taff Vale judgment) soon set right again; and (since 1900) their ‘Labour Representation Committee’ in Parliament. The former were able to put pressure on governments with serious industrial strikes; the latter (as the Labour Party) formed two minority governments in the inter-war years, and then three majority ones after World War II which – with the support of the more cuddly of the Conservatives – pushed the ‘equality’ agenda forward some way. Workers’ rights and social democracy were two banners behind which (relative) egalitarians could broadly unite.

These of course are what is missing today. The unions were emasculated under the Great Reaction; socialism was demoralized by perceived failure; the working classes were marginalized with the decline of heavy industry, and increasingly demonized (according to Owen Jones, Chavs, 2011) as stoats and weasels. Chiozza Money’s Liberal audience had been shocked and frightened by the wave of galloping inequality he revealed. Stiglitz’s and Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s audiences may be equally shocked by their revelations of this second, more dramatic wave, but have less reason to be frightened. That’s the difference between then and now.

On our Swedish island for the weekend. Beautiful autumn weather, a blazing log stove, and plenty of wine. It seems a world away from Donald Trump; but of course you can’t avoid him even here, and if he is elected even Sweden will suffer the fallout. Apparently Stockholm is expecting an invasion of rats over the winter, mainly in Östermalm, the posh quarter. I wonder how many of them are my compatriots escaping from the sinking ship that is Brexit Britain? – Serious blogging to be resumed soon.

Liam Fox’s encomium to global free trade, delivered recently in Manchester, the original home of the idea  (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/30/globalisation-poverty-corruption-free-trade-liam-fox), gives me an excuse to re-post this blog of mine from April this year, on the early Victorian version of the ideology, which Fox appears to have disinterred wholesale; and without having learned any of the practical lessons against it of the past 150 years. https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/30/global-utopia/. Take a look.

He’s right, however, to regard the European single market as an intrinsically anti-globalising institution in many respects. Theoretically, a country delivered from its protectionist rules should be able to trade more ‘freely’ in the world. That’s my worry.