Porter’s Pensées

Well, one good thing – the public schoolboys have gone. (From the new Cabinet, that is.) Apart from Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who is there, I presume, to clean up the international mess he’s made. Or as a punishment, for the ‘cad’ he is: like Tom Brown being roasted by the school bullies in front of a fire. (Except that Boris would deserve it.) We’ll see how that goes.

Public schoolboys really are a menace in public office. Eton seems to regard it as a mark of distinction that it has provided so many British prime ministers in history – Cameron was the 19^th – but that’s hardly to its credit, for two reasons. The first is that it’s not the school that got them there, but the privileges and connections they brought with them to the school, and the not-necessarily-deserved kudos the name of the school bestowed on them. The second is that Eton’s prime ministers ought surely to be judged on how they perform in that role; and so many of them, up to and including Cameron, have been duds. The earlier ones included some goodies, including Walpole, Pitt, Canning, Gladstone and Salisbury; but it was easier when they were only expected to rule for their class, and keep the plebs under control. Then came democracy, and the quality immediately declined: Rosebery, Balfour, Douglas-Home and Cameron – with only Macmillan, in my opinion, leavening the dough. I imagine that’s because they were so out of touch with the mass of the people they were governing, apart from as servants and tenants. Osborne’s (St Paul’s) whole incumbency at the Exchequer, and his extraordinary belief that the ‘threat’ of lowering house prices would turn the general populace against Brexit, illustrate that. Quite apart from Bullingdon, and the dead pig-fucking thing.

I’ve no idea what they teach them at Eton nowadays – or, more to the point, in Cameron’s time. It all used to be Greek and Latin bolstered by ‘character forming’ team games and buggery, but I’m sure it’s changed now. I’ve given talks on History at a number of Public schools in the past (though not Eton), and have been impressed by their pupils’ reception of them, but without gaining much insight into what sort of History was on their everyday syllabuses – any social history, say? (I was there to talk about imperial history. They seemed at home with that.) The right sort of History can broaden boys’ and girls’ empathy, and compensate to a degree for their limited social upbringings. All I can say is that there’s little sign of this in the Public school products we see in Government today. Any exceptions in the past have usually picked up their social ‘empathy’ elsewhere: Attlee (Haileybury) through his work in the East End ‘settlement’ movement; and he, Churchill (Harrow) and Macmillan (Eton) from their wartime experiences with the ‘ordinary’ troops. Not from their schools.

So, well done Theresa. (Apart from Boris.) And well done, too, for the great Corbynite speech you gave on your succession, which, if you can do all those things – reduce inequality, curb the banks, ensure the economy works for all the people – will probably leave Corbyn with not a leg to stand on. Of course I’m still worried by a lot of her past baggage, dragged along from her stint as Home Secretary: especially her positions on surveillance and human rights. But again, let’s see.

Getting rid of the toffs is a great thing. But of course it doesn’t solve our problems on its own. For a start, it’s not the toffs who have been the original source of our oppression, but the bankers and other assorted capitalists, using the upper-upper classes for their own purposes. Secondly, based on my experience at Cambridge, you don’t need to be a genuine toff to be toffish. On my college ‘high table’ were a few Fellows of ‘lower’ birth and education, most of whom, however, aspired to be upper class, and for that reason adopted upper-class attitudes more zealously than those who were born to them. The latter could relax, and be quite reasonable and radical at times; the ‘grammar school oiks’ however needed to prove their Tory credentials. They were the worst. (Not me!) Some of them may be in Theresa May’s cabinet.

Meeting Kajsa at Gatwick Airport. I thought I’d need to fill her in on events here in Britain. Not a bit of it. The Swedish papers are full of it. They of course are gobsmacked. ‘Clearly’, one of Kajsa’s friends tells her, ‘the English are not like us.’ That’s typical Swedish politeness: she really meant ‘mad’. Indeed. Journalists there are comparing our recent party leadership battles with Shakespeare plays – which the Swedes know well. Having watched a recording of the BBC’s superb Henry VI Part III last night – the one where the Yorkists and Lancastrians all stab each other, usually in the back; the Bard’s other ‘Lady Macbeth’ features (Queen Margaret); and Dick III hobbles in – I’m inclined to agree. (Which is Theresa May – Margaret or Richard?) In Shakespeare’s case, of course, his art was reflecting life. Today it looks like life reflecting art. Do our leaders get too much Shakespeare at school? Or are we still the Terrible Tudors at heart?

Theresa May seems to have sorted it for the Conservative Party. She’s the best outcome for them, and a potential winner, I predict, so long as she can keep her Brexit wolves at bay. Some of those are already growling behind the lines, but they would be stupid to try to bring her down – yet. In the meantime May is in the process of stealing all Labour’s best lines (see my last post but one), so queering the latter’s pitch. And Labour – not being as clever as the Tories at this kind of thing – are tearing themselves apart over their leadership; making them unelectable in the short term, whoever’s fault we think that is.

Luckily, however, the Left has longer than the ‘short term’ to get its house in order. That’s the only comfort I can draw from May’s pronouncements yesterday: that she isn’t inclined to call an early election. That gives Labour a possible four years to sort itself out. And if a week – or even a day, as we saw yesterday – is a ‘long time in politics’, just think what we could do with 200 weeks!

When Corbyn was elected Labour leader last year I always saw the possibility of his being a temporary appointment, but a strong and reforming one, to make the party more democratic, kinder, more honest and less austerian than it had become under Blair. I also hoped that the electorate’s experience of this, with just a little bit of favourable media coverage, might persuade the electorate, too, that this ‘new’ kind of politics had a lot to be said for it. In other words, he could shift the ‘political discourse’. Then might be the time to hand the tiller over to someone with a more conventionally impressive leadership ‘style’, but still preserving Corbyn’s reforms, in time for the next election.

But it was clear to me then that this would require time. The threat of a ‘snap’ election that was opened up by the Referendum result seemed to put paid to that. Lots of people were saying that Cameron’s successor would need a direct electoral mandate. That may be one of the reasons for this sudden rush on the Labour benches to get rid of Corbyn straightaway, on the grounds that there was no time to be lost. Now, if May keeps her word, or is able to (you never know, her enemies in the Tory party might see Labour’s present troubles as the perfect opportunity to trigger another vote soon), Labour has been given a breathing spell.

They should use it. Changing a political climate takes time. Call the dogs off Corbyn, especially as there’s no credible alternative to him in the offing just now, certainly not Angela Eagle; let him stay and his reforms bed in; until a more generally acceptable Left-wing saviour can be found to take over. By that time several relatively junior MPs – including my own, Diana Johnson – could have grown into the role. Right now I’d go for Hilary Benn: I know he has some baggage, including warmongering over Syria and plotting against Corbyn; but he’s an intelligent guy and must have some of his Dad’s DNA still in him.

I suppose there’s no hope of finding Barbara Castle still alive somewhere? My greatest political disappointment was that she didn’t become our first woman prime minister, rather than the Witch of Grantham. What a difference that would have made!

Could it all be a cunning Establishment plot? We know they didn’t want Brexit, but they’ve got it. So, how to get out of it?

Well, there are those 1,000 lawyers telling us that pulling out of treaties is the responsibility of Parliament, not ‘the people’, and that referenda can only be ‘advisory’; so we could legally disregard this one. That’s certainly true, in strict constitutional law; we’re a parliamentary not a plebiscitary democracy. A majority of MPs are in favour of Britain’s membership of the EU, so they could, if they dared, vote to disregard the ‘advice’ of the referendum and block the withdrawal. Now that we have all had a glimpse of what Brexit really means to us, and have seen through the sugar-coated lies peddled to us by Brexit, you might get a majority the other way if you decided to re-run the vote. But, with the people in as discontented and fractious mood as they are now – nothing to do with Europe, but that was what they chose to vent their anger on – to go against the ‘popular will’, as originally expressed, might, as they say, ‘start a riot’. It certainly wouldn’t do anything to repair the schism in the Conservative party. So, it’s too risky, even for our lords and masters.

So, what to do? Everybody thought that a Brexit win would result in a Brexit-led government: Boris as PM, Michael Gove as Chancellor, Farage haunting the corridors. That was why some of us voted the other way. But then Boris and Gove stabbed each other, dropping them both out of the race for Tory leader, and Farage withdrew to ‘get his life back’, leaving very few other viable candidates for a Brexit PM. Andrea Leadsom was the best the Brexiteers could come up with, to stand against Theresa May; but then she dropped out as she – or her minders – realized how toxic her brand of Toryism would feel. Which left May standing alone: a Remainer, but promising to respect the ‘people’s will’ over Europe, and unopposed, now, which means that her candidacy won’t need to be tested in the blimpish Tory shires. (So we won’t have a Corbyn situation, with members and MPs at odds.) Whether this will satisfy the Tory backwoodspeople is yet to be seen. But then Tories are far more obsequious when it comes to ‘party discipline’. I can’t see them mounting a ‘Momentum’ to get Andrea back.

In the circumstances, it’s hard to see how it could have gone any better for the Establishment; or worse for Labour, as I hinted in my previous post. Theresa, who will be in charge of the negotiations with the EU, obviously doesn’t have her heart in ‘independence’, and could well succeed in watering it down. She might also appeal to a wide swathe of voters as a relative ‘moderate’, and a ‘safe pair of hands’, by contrast both with her three former rivals for leader of her party, and with the bickering Labourites on the other side. I wouldn’t be surprised if in some way the Establishment and its secret agencies were found to have engineered this whole thing. They’re clever chaps, these Public school-educated nobs. And they’ve got plenty of form.

We should keep an eye on Theresa May. (For foreign readers, or any Brit who’s just come out of a coma, she’s one of the two runners in the current Conservative party leadership contest, and consequently our likeliest next prime minister.) She delivered a remarkable speech today – remarkable, that is, for a Tory. Most press interest was concentrated on its references to Europe, still today’s hot topic, where May’s problem is that she was a ‘Remainer’ during the referendum, but will need – if she wins – to negotiate Britain’s way out of the EU. But what she says on domestic policy is probably more significant in the longer term. Here it is.

She promises to govern ‘for everyone, not just the privileged few’, which must be a stab at Cameron and Osborne. She vows to put her party ‘at the service of working people’. She advocates regulation of big business to put workers on boards, and curb excessive executive pay. She makes a big thing of ‘equality’, in terms of class, gender and race.

Right now, if you’re born poor, you will die on average nine years earlier than others. If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white. If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else to go to university. If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately. If you’re a woman, you still earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s too often not enough help to hand. If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home.

All terrific – if she means it. And this from a woman who a few years ago drew hostility from other Conservatives by describing them as ‘the nasty party’, in popular perception at least. Since then she’s not vouchsafed many new ideas, save on domestic security, where they appear somewhat alarming to liberals – the ‘Snoopers’ Charter’, complaining about the European Convention on Human Rights, and all that; holed up as she has been for seven years in the Home Office, and restricting her stated opinions to that narrow area of policy. But the ‘nasty party’ charge is likely to do her some good now, in convincing those ordinary Conservative members (who are the ones who will decide the new leader) who want something softer, in order to appeal to the wider electorate, than her rival, Andrea Leadsom, the neo-Thatcherite, evangelical Christian, family values, anti-gay marriage, anti-workers’ rights – and all the rest of the baggage that comes along with these ideas – is offering.

Of course the old Tory harrumphers in the shires – there are only 150,000 of them, average age about 65 – may well prefer Andrea’s stronger tipple. If she promised the return of flogging in schools in addition, that would probably do the trick. (Watch out for that.) In which case we’d get Thatcher Mark II as our new Prime Minister; and everything would be ghastly for the country; – but OK for Labour, perhaps.

OK, because it would give a genuinely left-wing opposition party – Labour, or a ‘People’s Front’, or whatever emerges from the current chaos on the Left – something to gets its teeth into at the next general election. As it is, May might seem to offer reasonable ‘progressives’ a viable alternative to current Conservatism, which takes on board many people’s concerns about the way things are going just now. It could bring the Tories back.

And then we would have the problem of knowing whether to trust her on issues like equality and bonuses; any more than we should have trusted Cameron – ‘we’re all in this together’ – last time, or any Conservative before him who has seduced us with similar honeyed promises. (Remember Thatcher’s ‘those words of St Francis….’?) Plus, there are some ambiguities in May’s statement – who exactly are ‘working people’, for example? – and a lot of things her rhetoric doesn’t cover: ‘snooping’ for a start, and Trident, and austerity, and TTIP, and foreign adventures – which we might still get along with the honey. So personally I’d prefer these reforms at a genuine egalitarian’s hands, thank you very much.

In effect, what May has done is what Disraeli accused the Tory Sir Robert Peel of doing in 1845: ‘caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes.’ (For ‘Whigs’, read ‘socialists’.) Labour has been splashing around irresponsibly, throwing water (and worse) over each other, at the very time it ought to be coming together and mounting an attack on this desperately wounded government. Meanwhile May is, unobserved, up on the beach stealing their best policies, in a bid to trump them next time. It’s farcical, as is most of the rest of British politics just now. (I can’t wait for when I get back to Sweden, and sanity.) I hope the Labour MPs responsible for this will feel ashamed of themselves, if and when May becomes PM, and then trounces them at the next election. As May just Might.

*

PS. 11.30 am, breaking news. Leadsom has just dropped out. Does that mean May is the only one left in? Won’t that make the Brexiters cross? Couldn’t they draft Gove (always a Brexiter) in? We’ll see.

After all that has gone on these last two weeks, it feels like the End.  Not of the world, exactly, although if the people who back Brexit are the same as those who deny man-made climate change, that may not be long a-coming. Nor, necessarily, of ‘life as we know it’, though if Brexit upsets my relationship with Kajsa in Sweden it might put a dent in my life. (I’m applying for Swedish citizenship, just in case.) It certainly has the potential to mark the end of Great Britain, quite literally: the ‘Great’ there, of course, originally intended not to express any vainglory, as some foreigners appear to think, but simply that the country comprised more than just England. If Scotland scurries back, independently, to the comfort of the EU, that will be the end of that. (One wag has suggested calling the rump ‘the Former United Kingdom’, as in ‘the Former Yugoslavia’; or ‘FUK’.)

More than this, however, the past fortnight – Brexit, plus the Chilcot Report, plus the drubbing in football by Iceland, and all against the background of a capitalist crisis – could be said to mark the symbolic end of the old British Empire. That will be a boon for us imperial historians, who have never quite been able before now to decide when we should stop. (Or start, for that matter; but that’s another question.) My own The Lion’s Share. A History of British Imperialism (1975) had to have a chapter added to each of its four subsequent editions, as the life or afterlife of the old Empire meandered on. The latest one (2012) covered the Iraq War. This last couple of weeks have finally brought ‘closure’ to that.

There are several other dates and events one could choose for the end of the Empire – or at least, for the beginning of the end. Favourite ones are the two World Wars, Indian self-government, the Suez crisis, Macmillan’s ‘winds of change’ speech, the cession of Hong Kong, and even – going back further – the Boer War (1899-1902). Or earlier still, if you want to argue, as I do, that the Empire carried the seeds of its destruction within it from the start. But whenever we think it’s all over, something else pops up to remind us that it isn’t quite done with yet: a war in a piece of the Empire that was somehow left over, like the Falklands; a long-term repercussion of our past misadventures in various parts of the world; all those island tax havens in our ‘dependent territories’; or – more generally and probably permanently – the further spread of the old Imperial language throughout the world. And, of course, the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Chilcot has brought this particular manifestation of British imperialism to a close; although not of course for its victims, either in the Middle East or among the families of British soldiers killed there. It has been denied; but of course the Iraq War was a manifestation of British imperialism, or one type of imperialism: the ‘Liberal’ kind that was invented around the turn of the twentieth century, to divert criticism from its more acquisitive sort, and boasting more altruistic motives than had been associated with ‘imperialism’ before then. Under Blair it was re-named ‘liberal’ or ‘humanitarian interventionism’, but it was essentially the same: taking over countries, temporarily or permanently, in order to liberate them from evil – slavery, civil war, indigenous tyrants, the Germans, Saddam, or whatever. I’m personally convinced that this was Blair’s genuine motivation in Iraq, although I’m not so certain about his oil-greedy American allies. And of course this doesn’t excuse Blair for his – possibly criminal – misjudgements. Poor judgment has been at least as dangerous in history as wickedness. A study of the chequered history of earlier British imperial exploits – Gladstone in Egypt, for example – might have taught him that. (He could have got it from The Lion’s Share.) Nonetheless, the Chilcot Report has surely put an end for good to this kind of liberal imperialism on Britain’s part. And the recent drama of it all has ensured that – surely – the lesson won’t be forgotten.

For a historian it’s a happy coincidence that this came in the wake of these two other quite cathartic events: Brexit, which interrupted the continuity of British international history in just as dramatic a way, as well as potentially breaking up the Kingdom; and ‘England 1, little Iceland 2’. The latter struck me because it reminded me of a fictional incident I once read in a speculative novel by Peter Fleming, the brother of Ian and a bit of a right-wing nutter (The Sixth Column, 1966), which had the English cricket team being humiliated by a West African XI, as I remember, as the country finally ‘went to the dogs’. OK, the Iceland débacle wasn’t all that significant; but coming as it did in combination with Chilcot and Brexit it could be said to dramatise the crisis amusingly. (Kajsa was amused, at any rate.)

So, if I write any more British Imperial history books, I’ll now know when to finish: those two weeks from 23 June to 6 July 2016. That’s when, after years of slow Decline, the British Empire suddenly and finally Fell. Full stop. – This really is a great historical moment that we Brits are living through. Savour it! As a citizen I’m worried. As an imperial historian, however, I’m thrilled. It means I can now pen the final page, and retire.

Well, the Report is out at last, and by all accounts it isn’t at all the ‘whitewash’ that cynics were predicting. It really lays into Blair, confirming what I and the majority of historians and commentators had been saying almost from the start of the Iraq war. Two initial comments:

First. It didn’t require ‘hindsight’ to foretell what would be the war’s result and aftermath. That’s what Blair repeatedly claims. In fact Chilcot shows that experts in the fields of intelligence and Middle Eastern studies – and he could have added the history of imperialism – were warning him and Bush of the dangers at the time, pretty accurately. Blair chose to allow his own ‘instincts’ to override them. I imagine he’d go along with Michael Gove on this: ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’. On the contrary, in 2003 they (we) could have prevented a calamity.

Second. Blair’s sincerity is probably beyond question when he claims – ad nauseam, including in his uncomfortable press conference this afternoon – that he went to war because he thought it was ‘the right thing to do’. But that didn’t prevent the war’s being a disaster. What should be criticised here is not his motives, but his judgment. He doesn’t understand this; thinks that if he can square his motives with his ‘God’ then everything’s OK. But it’s not. One of the main themes in my British Imperial. What the Empire Wasn’t (2016) is that maleficent effects don’t need to be malevolently meant. ‘Harm can be done with the best of intentions’ (p.185). You don’t need to prove Blair was bad in order to believe he was wrong. Whether this affects the question of whether or not he should be charged as a ‘war criminal’ is a moot point. Do motives count?

The Labour leadership contest is a dreadful mess. It would be comic if it weren’t so vital, and tragic for those of us ordinary voters who are crying out for an effective Opposition to take advantage of the Conservatives’ own present disarray, and to bring them to book; not only for the Referendum fiasco but also for almost everything else that they have done in office. And primarily for their pursuit of the interconnected and now largely discredited ideologies of neoliberalism, globalisation and austerity.

It ought to be easy. Those policies are deeply unpopular now, and have never been tested in a truly representative general election. (I don’t imagine I need to replicate my old arguments against the UK’s present voting system: see https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/). If Labour had a generally accepted leader, it could probably force another election within a few months, even under the terms of the new more rigid ‘Fixed Term Parliament Act’; and – by means of some clever arrangements with, for example, the Lib Dems and the Greens to counterbalance the iniquities of the ‘First Past the Post system – see off UKIP, so long as it promised not to welsh on the verdict of the referendum; and bring in a Left-leaning government that would more accurately reflect the ‘popular will’. Then it could make a start of dismantling austerity, reviving (neo-) Keynesianism, putting the NHS back on its financial feet (with higher taxes), building more affordable homes, reforming the voting system, bringing the tax-dodgers to book (that would help pay for the NHS), and not invading anyone; which are all causes, as I understand it, that are close to Jeremy Corbyn’s heart.

‘Ay; but there’s the rub’. Corbyn isn’t the ‘generally accepted’ Labour leader. For myself, I don’t quite see why not. I voted for him as leader, in company with 60+% of the Labour membership, and have observed him quite closely (mainly on the BBC Parliament channel) in the country and in the House of Commons since. He promised a new style of politics, and he delivered on that: principled, polite, probing when it came to Prime Minister’s Question Time, and intelligent, in his contributions to the Referendum debate, for example, which were more frequent and substantial than is now being claimed – but only because the media didn’t pick them up – and which I found far more convincing as arguments than the lies and exaggerations peddled by the Tories who fronted the debate on both sides. This was immensely refreshing; a rational politics for the first time. Corbyn has also been effective in many ways, forcing government U-turns on, for example, the ‘bedroom tax’, Trade Unions, Housing, Tex Credit changes, and a dozen other policies, which isn’t bad for a minority leader; campaigning energetically for young people to register before the Referendum; winning – insofar as this is up to the leader – all the intervening bye-elections, most of them with increased majorities; consistently opposing the Iraq War (Leader or not, he must lead the debate on Chilcot), and still apparently attracting new members to the party in numbers the Conservatives can only dream of. Really, what has gone wrong?

His two great enemies, of course, have been the Press – overwhelmingly right-wing, mendacious, and with a corporate self-interest in Tory success; and the majority of his Parliamentary party, for reasons that probably include their relatively right-wing (Blairite) views, memories of his serial ‘disloyalty’ on the backbenches, a snobbish disdain for his old-fashioned Leftish demeanour (and clothes), a general feeling that he isn’t ‘one of them’ – the political establishment, the Westminster ‘bubble’, or whatever; and possibly personal experience of his conduct, at closer quarters than I’ve been vouchsafed, in the House of Commons. I’ve never even met him, so I suppose I can’t argue against that. Beyond this, however, his parliamentary colleagues seem to be convinced that, whatever his virtues, he ‘can’t win’ a General Election for Labour: on what grounds I’m not sure, unless it’s simply what they read in the papers (even the Guardian is pretty sneery towards him), and hear from the commentariat (like the sniffy Laura Kuenssberg) on TV. I was rather hoping he could, and that given time his brand of politics could be as appealing to other people as it is to me. Apparently not.

But it’s the papers that set the agenda and the tone of our politics, and are part of the reality, therefore, that we have to work within, or against. And – you never know – they might be right on the ‘electability’ thing – they’re the ‘experts’, after all; or that might turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. So I’m genuinely conflicted. I’m still a Corbynite, almost a Corbyn clone, in fact: old, a Londoner originally, grey-bearded, sloppily dressed, having fought the same causes as he did in my youth – CND, anti-apartheid, anti-imperialism, pro-trade union – and agreeing with his stated opinions almost 100%. But I have to agree that he’s not a ‘Leader’ in the mould that seems to be required these days – charismatic, forceful, a bit like Hitler; to his great credit, I think, but it will take time for him to persuade the larger electorate of the virtues of his kind of ‘leadership’ by comparison with what it has been taught to expect. Unless – and this is the big unknown here – the ‘social media’ can somehow compensate for the old media’s prejudices, and deliver over to us the young of the country, who are undoubtedly more pro-Corbyn, as well as having been predominantly for ‘Remain’.

And in the meantime the Left has work to do. Whoever wins the upcoming Tory leadership race – at the time of writing it’s between an illiberal authoritarian, an opinionated free-market zealot and war-monger (according to Kenneth Clark), and an ex-banker who wants to be another Thatcher (two of them women: is that a comfort?) – it won’t be good for the social justice, stability, equality and peace that most of us crave. (It’s a comfort, but only a small one, that the Old Etonians are out of it, at last. For now.) Short of electoral reform, which obviously won’t come in time, all our hopes lie in an effective Labour Party, hopefully as part of a broader Left alliance. If there’s another members’ election, I’ll probably vote for Corbyn again, but won’t really mind too much if someone more conventionally Leader-like wins it, so long as he or she (a) preserves the essentials of Jeremy’s ‘new politics’ – I wouldn’t be against that as a compromise; and (b) beats the Tories, when the next General Election comes along. That’s the most important thing. Otherwise we’re well and truly fucked. So get your fingers out, Labour MPs.

Yesterday’s ‘art’ commemoration in Britain of the centenary of the first day of the battle of the Somme was intensely moving: men dressed in authentic World War battledress walking around cities, sitting at stations as if ready to embark for the Front, sadly, silently, each with a card to give out with the name of one of the fallen on it, and all kept secret until then – like ghosts suddenly risen from the dead. (https://becausewearehere.co.uk) A brilliant and totally apt memorialisation; so different from the usual militaristic shenanigans.

I also noticed that on TV news and documentary programmes nothing was made of the ‘patriotism’ of the original men, which of course hardly existed after the first few weeks. Soldiers stuck to their duties, in situations of the utmost squalor and peril, not because of any loyalty to their country, but because of their comradeship with the ‘pals’ who were suffering alongside them. They didn’t want to let them down. It was the same at Gallipoli, another slaughterhouse, about which I published a review article recently. (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/bernard-porter/who-was-the-enemy.)

All of which must be annoying to Michael Gove, who when he was Minister of Education lambasted what he called the ‘Blackadder myth’ of the War, which he attributed to ‘left-wing academics’, who resile from the idea of ‘patriotism’ in order to undermine the patriotism of the present generation. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10548303/Michael-Gove-criticises-Blackadder-myths-about-First-World-War.html). I’m sorry, Govey, but that’s the ‘expert’ view, and not only among ‘Left-wingers’. But then you don’t believe in ‘experts’, do you?

What it does undermine, and why Right-wing ministers so resist it, is the authority and judgment of the governments which led these brave soldiers into this hell, and have continued to do so thereafter. Chilcot should corroborate this for a later war.

In the meantime, pictures of these ‘ghosts’ reduced me to tears. The time is now past, of course, for anger. But not in the case of Blair’s and Bush’s war.

I hope that this will be my final post on the referendum – though not necessarily on its repercussions. Anyone bored by the subject, or by my droning on about it, can skip it. Make yourself a cup of tea, and prepare for the next exciting political events bearing down on us: the Chilcot Report on Wednesday, then the party leadership elections, a possible general election, all kinds of literal horrors going on abroad, thanks (partly) to Tony Blair, and who knows what more in the days and weeks to come? Personally I wish the times were less exciting. But what else can you expect with global capitalism in its death throes?!

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On the referendum, I feel there’s one thing we should be clear about. Brexit wasn’t altogether their fault: ‘their’ of course referring to those who voted ‘Out’, or even their clownish and mendacious leaders. I’ve already indicated that Cameron was at least as much to blame, certainly tactically – agreeing to a 50-50 referendum on a single issue at a time when the electorate was feeling particularly bolshie about just about everything (see https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/); and then by the negative and scary way he conducted the ‘Remain’ side of the debate, even though much of the ‘scare’ stuff has turned out to be true. And then of course there’s our awful press. (That goes without saying.)

But the EU itself, or whoever runs it, is not altogether blameless. My own major gripes with it are, firstly, over the neo-liberalism that has taken it over in recent years, which of course is responsible for our immigration ‘problem’ (‘free movement’); and secondly its imperialistic propensities, which are also quite recent, and which I’ve written about before: (https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/05/27/eumperialism/). I have other problems with it too. The Euro is one – poor Greece! – but we’re not yet part of that. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for other considerations I might well have voted ‘Out’ on the 23rd. So I don’t blame anyone who did; or at least, without knowing what their particular motives were.

Nonetheless I admire some aspects of the European Union. On a personal, selfish level I like the way it enables me to travel unhindered between my two homes, in England and Sweden, and to enjoy Swedish healthcare, as Kajsa can enjoy the NHS. On a more airy-fairy level I like the friendship that it seems to have encouraged between peoples of different countries and cultures, and particularly among the young – who of course predominantly voted ‘In’. (Even if I’d not had my own views I think I would have deferred to theirs, on the grounds that the result of the vote will affect them for longer than us oldies.) I still think we could have built on that. I’m also very much in favour of Europe’s labour legislation, which I don’t think we would have adopted without it; and of the European Court of Human Rights, which has proved itself more liberal in general than our own courts. I’m quite happy being overruled by it. Lastly, I was aware that even if you don’t like a situation you’ve got yourself into, extricating yourself from it is not necessarily the answer. You can have become so entangled with it that the result is almost bound to be complex and painful: as it’s turning out to be. I don’t think the Brexiteers took enough account of that.

On top of that, however, there was a tactical reason why I opposed Brexit at this time, arising out of the political situation in Britain. The problem, as I saw it, was that the leading Brexiteers had totally different objections to the EU from mine, being – as they were – Tories, and so opposed on principle to both of the material aspects of the Union I most valued: labour legislation and human rights. Gove and Farage are both ‘small government’ men, as is probably Boris Johnson, if one can be sure about what he thinks at any one time. Like most other people during the campaign I assumed that if Brexit won, the outcome would be a new government headed by Boris and Gove, which had to be worse, I thought, for the causes I valued. In the event it hasn’t turned out like that; but Theresa May is not exactly a reassuring alternative, as the leading Conservative authoritarian. (See https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/the-snoopers-charter/.) Frying pans and fires came to mind. So the prospect was not an inviting one. Another reason I came to oppose Brexit even more strongly was the xenophobia and racism it seemed to be stirring up as the campaign went on; and the way it was obviously demeaning us, as a nation, in foreign eyes. In my last post I mentioned how humiliated I feel in Sweden. I imagine most ‘Out’ voters didn’t think of that; or if they did, like Nigel Farage, made a virtue of it.

Better than this, I thought, would be to stay inside the Union, and try to reform it from within. What I should like ideally, and what I always hoped for the EU, is that it could shelter us, in a way a weak national government could never do, from the anti-social effects of globalisation. It’s the latter which is the root cause of most of our present troubles, after all, not ‘Europe’, whose main fault has been the way it has played along with global capitalism. The idea of using the EU as a brake on the capitalist behemoth is of course much mocked by cynics, and I certainly wouldn’t put any money on it myself; but there are two prospective circumstances which might make it a possibility. One is the world-wide reaction against neo-liberalism that began after the last ‘Great Recession’, and shows little sign of waning yet, which might – just might – change the whole economic discourse over the next several years, which would surely make fundamental alternatives to the present economic status quo just possible. Another, related to this, is the rise of left-wing anti-austerity political parties within the European Union that a British Labour government – certainly under Corbyn, if he’s still there – could co-operate with in order to achieve a new order. That would be worth fighting for, if only to prevent the most likely alternative, which is presaged by the rise of Right-wing, neo-Fascist parties in Europe. Of course, the rest of Europe might achieve this – continental socialism – on its own. There are signs of deep unrest all over, much of it dredged up to the surface perhaps by our Brexit crisis, which could be channelled Leftwards rather than to the neo-Fascist and racist Right. If so, however, it would be sad if Britain could not be part of it.

Those were my thoughts during the campaign. I did waver at one moment, acknowledging the force of the anti-EU argument – I mentioned this in one of my posts – but as the campaign went on I was strengthened in my leaning to the ‘Remain’ side by the frankly silly personalities leading the opposition to it, and by the blatant lies they came out with; which a law professor recently castigated as so ‘criminal’ as possibly to nullify the result (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-eu-referendum-michael-dougan-leave-campaign-latest-a7115316.html). Then there was the hatred, xenophobia and – in one case, murder – which accompanied that awful debate, and the racist attacks that have followed it, for which Farage and the UKIP wing of Brexit must bear some of the responsibility; all of which confirmed my – by now – strong resolution to stick to the ‘Remain’ side. I’m sure now I was right, but can’t blame anyone who leant the other way, in view of the clear imperfections of the EU, and the propaganda that was fed to them. However, as I wrote last time, as a sporting nation we have to stick with the result. After all, it was only a game, wasn’t it, Boris?

I suppose a socialist Europe is unlikely in the near future. It reminds me – though this doesn’t have much relevance to our present situation – of a solution that George Bernard Shaw proposed a century ago to the great problem of Britain’s Empire – whether it should be formally dissolved, which the anti-imperialist Shaw thought would only leave its constituent parts more vulnerable to economic imperialism, or what today is called ‘globalisation’; or alternatively, as he thought, transformed into a truly socialist ‘commonwealth’. Quite frankly, if that had been practicable I think it might have been better for everyone, including the ex-colonies for whom ‘independence’ – or ‘Empexit’ – has not always been an undiluted boon. But of course it was highly unlikely, in the face of colonial nationalism; just as it may be in the case of today’s European Empire, with narrow-minded nationalists like Farage – and le Pen in France, and Åkesson in Sweden, and many others – around.

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So, bye-bye Brexit. Wheel on Chilcot, and another kind of ‘imperialism’ – going then under the name of ‘liberal interventionism’ – which I probably know more about, and have written about in books.