Porter’s Pensées

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.

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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.

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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.

There will be a piece on the Julian Assange affair in tomorrow’s Guardian.* (Remember him?) This follows a press conference given today in Gothenberg by his Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, against whom the Swedish press seems at last to be turning, if Kajsa’s account of a highly critical Swedish TV documentary aired tonight is typical. I’ve written about this before: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/02/07/assange-again/.

In my opinion it’s a deeply scandalous affair, reflecting very badly indeed on Madame Ny and even on Sweden. (Which is – if Migrationsverket is reading this: remember I’m applying for citizenship – a terrific country in every other way.) Ny has still apparently made no effort to interview Assange in England, after 18 months of being urged to by a UN Commission and a Swedish court, leaving Assange still incarcerated for – is it five? – years in the Ecuadorian Embassy, to the considerable detriment of his health. Assange is happy to be tried in Sweden on the sex charges he is accused of, so long as he gets a promise that Sweden won’t extradite him from there to the USA. That is surely reasonable. He maintains that he’s innocent, and from the mountain of evidence I’ve looked through I can’t believe that his case, if it came to court, wouldn’t be immediately and indeed scornfully thrown out.

Swedish friends of mine are puzzled by Ny’s behaviour. She is of course a pretty extreme feminist (she thinks any man simply accused of rape should be imprisoned before trial). Conspiracy theorists suspect that the US government has something to do with it. They may be right on this. My theory, however, is that she and the Swedish judicial establishment don’t want the case to come to trial, for fear it will show up the grotesqueries of the Swedish legal system, to the ridicule of the whole world.

In the meantime the accusations against Assange have fulfilled one of their purposes, which is to smear him and by extension Wikileaks by association with sex crimes, which certainly had a negative effect in gender-sensitive Sweden. If it was the CIA that set him up in the first place – another conspiratorial explanation, for which again there is some circumstantial evidence – they certainly knew what they were doing.

PS (next day): the Guardian piece was very tiny: 3 inches at the bottom of p. 26.

The British parliament has only rarely reflected opinion in the country, as it should do ideally, as a supposedly democratic body. Before 1928 this was mainly because the House of Commons deliberately excluded huge swathes of Britain’s population: most of the working classes in the 19^th century, women before 1918, and women on the same terms as men until 1928. Now that has been corrected, with only a few small minorities still formally disfranchised: criminals, the certified insane, peers of the realm (who of course have their own ‘House’), and those who haven’t bothered to register.

Latterly, however, its unrepresentative nature can be traced to to the astonishing vagaries of the British ‘first past the post’ electoral system, against which I’ve inveighed before: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/. I dealt with one of the (genuine) merits of this system there: local accountability. But another advantage is often said to be that it ensures ‘strong’ government. By that is meant single-party government, even if that party gathers only 30-40 per cent of the votes. Up to now people have seemed to accept this, having got used to the rules of what for most of them is only a game, and being the particular beneficiaries of it if they are Conservatives or Labour, or, before the 1920s, Liberals. Only ‘losers’ whinge. You knew the rules; it’s hardly cricket to complain. And proportional representation, they say, only creates insecurity and therefore national ‘weakness’.

Well, having lived in proportionally-represented Sweden for the past twenty years, I find it hard to see that. Coalition governments have been able to work pretty well there. In addition, voter participation in Swedish elections is far higher than in Britain, which must be one measure of true ‘democracy’. And of course, electors are more likely to find a party they agree with, or to be able to form one, if there is a variety of them to choose from with realistic prospects of at least sharing power, under a system where votes for minor parties, even before they become major parties, are not necessarily ‘wasted’.

It would be good if a popular movement could be whipped up in favour of a more clearly democratic electoral system along these lines. (I’ve already explained, in that earlier post, how local accountability could still be built in.) Of course it won’t happen, without some kind of existential crisis intervening in the meantime. People here aren’t interested in democracy; the fact that our present version of it is so devalued – crooked MPs, and so on – is one reason for this. And ‘first past the post’ is too valuable an asset for the major parties, and for those who can manipulate the system, to want to lose hold of it. Maybe the present splits in both the Labour and the Conservative parties might bring people around to the idea that there are fairer ways of getting governments that reflect their wishes. Or the difficulties we are likely to experience with Brexit might stir us up. But don’t bet on it.

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Moving on to the present-day situation, it seems obvious that our present government fails in this respect. We know that most of the electorate doesn’t positively share the present Conservative government’s view of things, because 75% didn’t vote for it. Moreover, when people were given a rare chance to exercise their votes in a more direct and effective way, in the EU referendum, the result reflected – in my view – more their general hostility to the government than their considered views of Europe itself. (See https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/.)

My view now – though I ‘m sure I’ll be mocked for this – is that most Britons are essentially socialists, or at least socialist-ish, underneath: co-operative, communitarian, fair-minded, decent people. Brexit obscured this, by highlighting its leaders’ – especially Farage’s – right-wing racism; but I really don’t believe that this applied to a large number of their followers. On the contrary, they were mainly fuelled by a vague sense of hostility to the metropolitan ‘Establishment’, and resentment that the way the British economy has been going in recent years had left them far behind. Trump’s supporters in the USA are the same. In both cases immigrants were more tangible and visible scapegoats for this than – in Britain’s case – the vicious economic policies of Cameron and Osborne, and the great Global forces that lay behind them. It was a matter of ‘false consciousness’, as Marx put it, though it sounds patronising to say it.

Still, if only they could come to see their true interests, and their true enemy, the Labour party could surely harness many of the Ukip voters to its cause. A Corbyn victory in the leadership election, and his rebel MPs’ willing acceptance of that, would be the first stage. Labour may want to make some adjustments to its policies with regard to immigration: maybe excluding some immigrants – there is after all no principled or socialist reason for allowing unrestricted entry into any society: that’s a ‘free market’ thing’; educating the ones who enter, if necessary, and directing them to where they’re needed; strictly preventing their exploitation as cheap labour (Sweden, incidentally, does most of these things); somehow (I don’t know how) neutralising the Islamic terrorist threat, which is an understandable if not a good reason for popular anti-alienism; and doing more to advertise the positive sides of immigration, which are many. Together with Corbyn’s other social and economic policies, and his deliberate populism, that could be enough to draw large number of Ukip voters away from their increasingly tainted and ridiculed leadership, and leave their party with only its right-wing, racist rump.

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All this, however, would be immensely aided if parliamentary politics were flexible enough to cope with such changes in allegiance more easily and immediately. That could only come about with some form of PR. Then Corbyn’s Labour party could shed its Blairite rump too, and along with it Labour’s long and damaging association with the despised ‘Establishment’, or ‘Westminster bubble’, making its numbers up with non-racist Ukippers, and perhaps – who knows? – some Scots and Welsh Nationalists, LibDems, and Greens. Even if not, the Greens in particular would undoubtedly boost their own vote, and could reach a position where a Centre-Left alliance, reflecting public opinion more accurately, could take them into government with Labour and other ‘progressives’. (That’s the position in Sweden, too.) That must be better than the situation as it is now, with the two main (English) parties standing monolithic and immoveable, and as a result riven by internal arguments over their respective ‘souls’. You couldn’t imagine that, or its being so damaging, in Sweden, where the soulful have other places to go.

I love early morning radio. ‘Thought for the Day’, the point at which most people turn off and get up to put the coffee on, is one of my favourites, with proper arguments – even if I disagree with them – rather than soundbites. The religious ones generally sugar their religion with something intelligent. (I think ‘Jesus saves’ would get me out of bed pretty smartly.) Most of them have interesting things to say.

On Sundays this is replaced with ‘A Point of View’, which is usually equally worth listening to. This morning’s was. It was by one Tom Shakespeare, a ‘bioethicist’, arguing very cogently a position that I aired eighteen months ago on the LRB Blog (http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/11/25/bernard-porter/parliamentary-roadshow/): that, while the present crumbling Palace of Westminster is being refurbished, parliament might travel around the country, in the manner of the old mediaeval courts, in order to experience what life outside the ‘bubble’ was really like. The BBC4 website even gives the programme the same title as my blog. I’m not implying plagiarism; ‘Parliamentary Roadshow’ is an obvious name for it, and I’m sure I wasn’t the first to think of the main idea. Here’s the link to the programme, if you can get it up (I couldn’t): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07qc93n#play.

Alternatively, suggests Shakespeare, Parliament could be moved to a single provincial city for the full six years. He suggests Birmingham. For those who have to work in Whitehall, he argues, that would have the further advantage of making them experience the intercity rail travel we ordinary folk have to endure. That’s a good point.

My own preferred choice, however, would be Manchester. The neo-gothic City Hall there looks a bit like Barry and Pugin’s parliament building – indeed, in my opinion it’s architecturally far superior; and to my mind Manchester is Britain’s (or at least England’s) second capital, historically: that is, the capital of radical Britain, in many different ways. But I doubt whether our legislators will want to leave London, with all its pleasures; and City financiers and newspaper editors might not take kindly to MPs’ being out of their sight, and therefore away from their maleficent influence, for that stretch of time.

Clegg’s interview in today’s Guardian reveals a lot about the Tories. Osborne comes out of it worst. Apparently he didn’t care in the slightest about the effects of his cuts on the lives of ordinary people, as long he could pander to anti-welfare prejudices stirred up by the Daily Mail, in order to boost the Tories in the polls. This was quite blatant and deliberate. ‘I don’t understand,’ Clegg reports him as saying (or it may have been Cameron – Clegg isn’t quite sure) ‘why you keep going on about the need for more social housing – it just creates Labour voters.’ Isn’t that more than just wrong? To my mind it’s sheer evil.

I always regarded Osborne as the most unattractive of that awful bunch of Tory ministers: white, waxen features, cold eyes, public-school arrogance, that smirky grin: he’d play well as a Victorian or early silent movie villain; but I’m always reluctant to let first superficial impressions colour my opinions of people unfairly. In George’s case, however, his face – not just his eyes – would seem to be the window into his soul.

Clegg’s other main target is the awful Gove – the fish-faced one – the pretentious superficiality of whose views on just about everything Clegg characterises well.

The more I governed with Gove and his team, the more I realised he was just striking a series of superficial poses. You’ve got a generation of politicians very close to the media, people like Boris Johnson and Gove, and the problem is, the skill of tossing off 800 words on one subject and then on another a week later is completely different to governing… With Gove it was just a series of throwaway poses …. There’s this ersatz intellectual heft that Gove and his people have that I don’t think is merited.

I like the ‘ersatz intellectual heft.’ That chimes in with my own analysis: see  https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/michael-gove/.

What may have disguised the personal awfulness of that government was the smooth urbanity of its leading personality, David Cameron – the velvet glove around the iron fist. For a while his rhetoric suggested that he wanted to put paid to Theresa May’s famous put-down of the Tories as being perceived as ‘the nasty party’; but that reformation came to appear more and more threadbare as his government went on. Clegg lays into May too, mainly for deliberately understating the number of Brits working on the Continent in order to make the case that European immigration to Britain was disproportionate. And she certainly looks evil. On the other hand, she was the originator of that ‘nasty party’ gibe; has seemed in her utterances to date to be distancing herself from Osborne and Gove, clearly casting them in her ‘nasty’ role; and has come out as a social reformer, concerned about inequality and bankers’ bonuses, in a way that – if she lives up to it (and it’s a big ‘if’) – could bring about a revolution in our politics radical enough to disarm the Corbyn threat. (See https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/st-theresa/.)

British politics seem, for the moment, to be moving broadly leftwards. The Tories could, if they’re clever, ride this to long-term victory. Osborne and Gove, brutally excluded from May’s cabinet, would be permanently consigned to Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, its eerie light reflecting horribly off their waxen features. They’d look at home there. They’d be replaced by May’s Joseph Chamberlain or Harold Macmillan-like social Conservatism. Labour, of course, whatever colour it takes on after its leadership vote (or colours – plural – if it splits), would be out of it. I suppose it’s my tribal loyalty to Labour that makes me hope that May, just like Thatcher and Cameron before her, is revealed later as a liar and a hypocrite. Then only Labour would remain as the true social reformers.

Except that there is, of course, a third alternative, which hardly bears thinking about: the right-wing authoritarianism that seems so powerful in the USA and France (among other countries) just now. I intend to blog later on how Labour might harness to its cause the less racist elements of Brexit’s support. But that would require a Corbyn win in the leadership contest first. It’s complicated. (And of course there’s Brexit itself to deal with first.)

(For the Clegg interview, see http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/03/nick-clegg-did-not-cater-tories-brazen-ruthlessness).

For anyone who missed the recent BBC dramatization of Joseph Conrad’s novel, I’d urge you to catch up on it. It’s on DVD. I’ve just finished watching a recording of it that I made when I was away. This is an area of particular interest to me, of course, as a bit of an expert not on Conrad particularly, but on the history of the early London Metropolitan Police Special Branch, which was originally founded to counter anarchist and Irish terrorism in Britain at the end of the 19^th century, and which is featured (under another name) here. (See my The Origins of the Vigilant State, 1987.) I’ve also researched the real-life ‘Greenwich Park’ bomb plot (1894), which is the central event of the book.

Conrad may have got that wrong. The original Greenwich bombers, it’s believed now, weren’t intending to target the Observatory, but were on their way to the Greenwich docks, whence they planned to ship the bomb to Russia. Nor is there any evidence that they were set up by the Russian secret police (the Okhrana). Or that they ran a pornographic postcard shop. (I think.)

But in general Conrad, and now the BBC drama series, got it absolutely right. Those shops did exist. The bomber did blow himself up (there’s a contemporary drawing of the horrible scene reproduced in my book). The Okhrana did employ spies and agents provocateurs in Britain, with the purpose – highlighted here – of persuading Britain to tighten her liberal laws on refugees, asylum and ‘political’ policing: in vain, as it happened. It all rings true. As do the superb, atmospheric settings.

And the acting; in particular Toby Jones as Verloc – a masterly performance – and Stephen Graham as Chief Inspector Heat. I recognise the latter from my studies of the Special Branch’s personnel; especially his ultimate decency. This in fact is one of the great virtues of Conrad’s characterisations: that all of them – except perhaps the Russian attaché, a cliché baddy, and the bomb-making ‘Professor’, a stereotypical mad anarchist – are complicated people. So are their relations with one another. The choices Verloc is confronted with are not simple, practically or ethically. Above all, as suggested by the plot line (‘agent-provocateuring’), the relations between the Anarchists, the police, the British government and foreign governments, are subtle and complex. Conrad is good at that. It is what – to my mind – makes him the greatest of English political novelists.

Are there any present-day lessons to be drawn from this? I’ve always been reluctant to make precise and practical comparisons between ‘now’ and ‘then’. In this case, the main comparison is obvious – terrorism – but overshadowed by a huge contrast: between late Victorian innocence, or naivité if you like, though it was not foolishly naive at that time; and Britain’s present-day ‘surveillance state’. I’ve blogged on this before (https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/the-snoopers-charter/). But there are no automatic or easy conclusions that follow from this. We are a very different people from our turn-of-the-20^th century forebears, living in different times. We can envy the late Victorians for their liberalism in this regard. But then we need to remember how oppressive those times were in other ways. Perhaps it’s lesson enough to be shown how different things can be.

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Incidentally (and irrelevantly): the current TLS carries a long review of my last two books. Not a rave, but flattering on the whole, and engaging intelligently with my argument, which is better.

I’m a ‘professor emeritus’. Gosh, that sounds good, doesn’t it? The word ‘merit’ embedded there, in the fancy Latin, must denote something special, more than a mere ‘professor’? (Those are two a penny nowadays.)

Actually, no. All it means is that I’m retired. To those in the know it denotes that I’m old, past it, out to grass. I no longer have to work at professing. The ‘emeritus’ thing is bestowed, I think, on all professors on leaving their final jobs. The title looks more distinguished than it is.

That said, it’s also indicative of something else. That ‘something’ is what used to be called ‘collegiality’. The idea probably derives from the older English universities, where a ‘college’ (their basic building blocks) was regarded as a community of scholars, from the highest (the ‘Master’) to the lowest (freshman undergraduates), and including all those who had formally ‘retired’. Very often the last were still given rooms in college long after their teaching functions had expired. Even outside Oxbridge a retired member of staff could be expected to be given an office somewhere on the campus, if he or she was still engaged in research, to keep their books in and to write from. They were always given free access to the university library and all its facilities, secretarial assistance, and – in modern times – allowed to keep their university email addresses. They stayed on circulation lists for university events, and for departmental seminars, which – again – embraced all parts of the ‘community’, and where retirees, or emeriti, could keep in regular touch. They always turned up – those who still lived locally – to the great pleasure and the intellectual profit of those who remained in harness, as well as of themselves. They weren’t just abandoned, cut off from what had always been more than a ‘job’, but was also a society and an essential aspect of their identity, to which they could contribute mightily even after the formal economic tie – pay in return for teaching – had been broken.

In Britain this ideal doesn’t seem to have broken down yet, though I’ve been away from the university scene there too long to know for sure. I still have library rights, and am invited to events and seminars, at most of the universities I’ve taught at, both in England and abroad. I still feel a part of those communities, and I like to think they accept me as part of them too. There has been no drastic break between us. Collegiality lives on; despite the effects of Thatcherite utilitarianism, and the new and by now notorious breed of university managers’ attempts to undermine collegiality on other fronts.

From what I understand, this isn’t the situation everywhere in the world. A friend of mine (who is retirement age) has just been told that she’s no longer wanted at Stockholm University, an institution she’s served with distinction, and with the enthusiasm both of herself and of her students, for thirty years; told to clear her ‘stuff’ from her room within five days – in insulting terms: the administrator who wrote to her was apparently offended by dog hairs there, and demanded she clean them up herself; had her email address discontinued, without even any automatic forwarding facility; and may have her staff library card taken away.

This is all part of a more ‘managerial’ and ‘top-down’ way of running the university that has apparently crept in recently, with staff treated as mere employees, like in a factory or office, with nothing more than what Carlyle (and after him Marx) called the ‘cash nexus’ to bind them together; no sense of community or collegiality; no appreciation, therefore, of the real and essential quality of academic activity and life. One is surprised to find these things happening in co-operative, consensual and social democratic Sweden. Perhaps it could have done with an Oxford and Cambridge too, in order to root the ‘collegial’ ideal more historically and firmly in its academic mores. (But without Oxbridge’s egregious flaws.)