Porter’s Pensées

By one way of looking at it, the vote on Thursday will be the latest in a long line of attempts by Britain to find the ‘role’ that she lost – as US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said in 1962 – when she was parted from her empire. It would be nice to think that it might also be the last stage, and that we can put all that empire stuff behind us after June 23^rd; but does anyone think that either side will accept the result if it goes against them? Of course they’ll cry foul. There are already conspiracy theories being posted on the web claiming that the atrocious murder of Jo Cox was in fact a ‘false flag’ operation, arranged by a secret cabal of ‘Remainers’ to garner the sympathy vote for their cause. (Here’s one example: http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2016/06/conspiracy-corner-killing-of-jo-cox.html.) Without going quite that far, Farage today complained that Cameron was at least milking the murder to that end. On the Remain side, much is being made of the false propaganda (and it is false) used by the Brexiters to fool voters that, for example, £350 million a week net is going to Europe, and that Turkey is about to become a member of the EU.

From a neutral point of view it’s easy to argue – as I have done (https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/) – that the vote won’t be about Britain’s place in Europe in any case, but rather about Tory austerity, getting rid of the Etonians, and people’s general discontent. Many voters will be attracted – or repelled – simply by the personalities of the men leading the debate. (Nearly all men. If only more women had come forward, or been allowed, to participate! At the very least that must have moderated the tone of the debate.) Anything but Europe per se. Any grievance will do, to land a blow on the Tory party, in this first chance the electorate has had for a year to get back at this minority out-of-touch austerity government which is the real fount – not the EU – of most of its miseries. It really is going to be difficult to vote for a cause led by Cameron and Osborne in these circumstances, even in pursuit of what you may feel is a greater good. It will certainly stick in my craw. It’s only the prospect of those other Tory clowns – Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage – taking over, that strengthens my resolve. So I’ll not really be voting on the ‘issue’, either.

In any event, who is really bothered today about Britain’s ‘role’ or ‘place’ in either Europe or the world? (Apart from sporting.) A few leading politicians, probably, for whom it comes with the territory. But your ordinary Joe – or Jo?  Workers (if there are any left), shop assistants, bus drivers, doctors, nurses, teachers, academics scribbling their books and blogs in provincial towns? – In fact scarcely anyone seems to be looking at the international implications of the vote, either way; just at what they think it can do for them, personally and selfishly. All the propaganda is addressed to that. Nothing on what it will do to Europe, or to the stability of the world. We really are – to adapt Napoleon’s notorious bon mot – just a nation of shoppers, oblivious to broader and higher things. In a way that might be said to answer Dean Acheson’s point. This – a country of consumers – is our new ‘role’.

From Europe’s point of view the whole appalling debate has severely undermined that ‘role’, or at least our reputation and image. Continental press reaction (judging by the Swedish papers) is a mixture of disbelief, mockery and fright. (See https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/06/14/the-stupidest-nation-on-earth/.) It’s all very insalubrious, and embarrassing for someone who lives abroad much of the time. I’m used to having to apologise for the empire; now I’ve got to try to excuse this. What an awful misjudgment it was, to call a referendum at this time! It could destroy us, whichever way it goes. Cameron will never be forgiven for it. At least poor, weak John Major was able to face his Eurosceptic ‘bastards’ down.

But it will be exciting. I’ll be watching it on TV. Either that or the disaster movie on the other side.

*

For what it’s worth, I predict a ‘Remain’ win, by about seven points. That’s based on nothing but gut feeling. I know it goes against today’s poll findings, but they’ve been notoriously wrong before. We’ll see, in three days’ time.

Few of the world’s really awful events have been unexpected. For ten years before both the first and the second World Wars people were warning that something dreadful was about to happen. They might not have known what form exactly the catastrophe would take, though in both these cases European war was the obvious one. The atmosphere was febrile, culturally as well as politically. So neither war took many people by surprise.

Having intensively studied the history of those two periods, I think I can detect some of these same signs today. It’s not something I can back up with solid evidence, exactly; just a feeling I get from having soaked myself in the pre-1914 and pre-1939 periods. But there are things one can point to, common to all three times: and, significantly, not to others, or not in quite the same way. A recent economic depression is one, followed by stagnation. A widespread lack of confidence in both the economic and the political systems one is bound by is another. Pessimism was rife. Who is an optimist today? Growing nationalism almost everywhere is a third sign, much of it based quite manifestly on feelings of recent national humiliation. The rise of blatant irrationalism is a fourth, seen today most obviously in Donald Trump, but also, more mildly, in Michael Gove’s recent comment on ‘experts’. (And if you think I’m being patronizing there, it’s probably because you’re one of the irrationalists yourself. There are some around, even in academia.) There were some particularly ‘toxic’ political controversies before both wars, and on similar themes to today’s. A sixth sign may be the two substantial influxes of refugees that took place prior to the wars, in those cases both Jewish, unsettling communities, at the very least. There may be other parallels – moral shifts, criminal trends, literature (like dystopian science fiction), and artistic fashions – which I don’t know about, not having studied them deeply. But these will do for a start.

Lastly: there is the outpouring of published statements of doom and gloom coming out just now, as they did then, in a way that hasn’t been seen before in my lifetime – save from paranoid Tories under Labour (‘country’s going to the dogs…’), and of course at the time of the USA-USSR nuclear face-off. But this is different. Here’s one example, picked at random, posted by Owen Jones on Facebook at the height of the current poisonous debate over Brexit, and just after Jo Cox’s murder. ‘I love this country, but never have I been so scared about it. The growing bitterness, resentment and hatred is genuinely frightening.’ That’s typical. I go along with it.

Like most of the Cassandras before World Wars I and II, I’m not sure what guise the crisis will assume. I can see, or sense, the glowering clouds, but can’t tell what exactly they forebode. It’s unlikely to be another Anglo-German war – I guess. The best case scenario is a collapse of the government here, which might not be so bad. Ditto the break-up of the European Union. The worst case doesn’t bear thinking about, with the Donald’s finger on the nuclear button. But whichever it is, we can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Yes, of course our democracy is in mortal danger. But not from the likes of Thomas Mair. Nor even from Brussels; or from the far Right or Left in politics; or from one of the foreign threats to it that are often trotted out as reasons why we should modify our liberal principles to cope with them. Today it’s Islamicism; yesterday it was Soviet communism. Before that it was French Jacobinism, and Spanish Catholicism. That’s not to say that these dangers have not been significant in their (and our) times. I fear radical terrorism also. But the main weakness of our democracy is self-created. It is our diminishing trust in it. That has been going on for some time.

It has come up for discussion in the last couple of days, with reference to poor Jo Cox (I can hardly think of her death without getting tearful), and the way she has been widely and genuinely mourned, in a way that is unusual for politicians. Airy Neave MP – murdered by the IRA in 1979 – didn’t receive this degree of sympathy. But Neave wasn’t a man of the people. He was a patrician: Eton, Oxford, British Intelligence. Dead patricians aren’t genuinely mourned by the people unless – like Churchill – they are perceived to have done something remarkable for them. Thatcher was only mourned by the bankers; the rest of us stood around singing ‘The witch is dead!’ Jo Cox was a woman of the people: a ‘Yorkshire lass’, born in the town she later came to represent in the Commons, lower-middle class, honest, and dedicated to her constituents and the good of the oppressed of the wider world, rather than to her own career and advantage. I realized how much she was temperamentally outside the political elite, or the ‘Westminster bubble’, when I read an account of the social discomfort she experienced in going ‘up’ to Cambridge, which was reminiscent of my own. She was one of us.

Unfortunately, in order to do the best she could for them, as she believed, she fell amongst politicians; and politicians are almost the most demonized group – apart from the plebs – in society just now. Jonathan Freedland writes about this in today’s Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/17/political-contempt-politicians-eu-referendum. It’s all there. Politicians are all out for themselves: unprincipled careerists and office-seekers, prone to corruption, and entirely divorced from ordinary folk. Look at all the scandals that have surrounded them in the recent past: cash for questions, party donations for honours, expenses fiddles, and Tony Blair becoming a millionaire on the back of the connexions he made as a minister. (That’s without the sex scandals, which are unimportant, surely, but in the eyes of the public add to the fetid smell.)

OK, granted, some of them are shockers. But this doesn’t describe the majority of MPs, as Freedland points out in his piece. It certainly didn’t characterize Jo Cox. It didn’t even characterize Margaret Thatcher, if we’re honest, who was not particularly self-serving (she didn’t need to be, with a rich hubby), and also genuinely saw her role as doing ‘good’ for her country and its people, though it was a horrendously mistaken version of the ‘good’. And in my experience of politicians – nearly all Labour ones, as it happens, but stretching way back to the time when I was at Cambridge, and was ‘college rep’ for the Labour Club, mainly because they couldn’t find another socialist at Corpus – they’ve mostly been decent people, as far from today’s negative stereotype as you could imagine. That applies to all of my successive constituency MPs, in Cambridge, Hull and Newcastle, as well as in particular to the two great socialist heroes I had the pleasure of meeting: Barbara Castle (she should have been our first woman prime minister!) and Robin Cook. I’ve not met as fine public servants as those two. At yet they have been as demonized as the rest. I remember reading one Tory referring to Castle as ‘that castellated bitch.’ And of course the provincial Harold Wilson was traduced terribly. (See below: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/03/11/harold-wilson/). So this sort of thing goes back. Historians of politics like to point to the cartoons of Gillray and Rowlandson around the turn of the nineteenth century, which were far more scabrous than almost anything today. (I don’t think Martin Rowson or Steve Bell has ever drawn Queen Elizabeth’s farting bum.) But their sort died out during the nineteenth century, as Britain became progressively more genteel and democratic, and so more accountable; until there came a time when politicians, as a class, were treated with some respect.

Too much respect, undoubtedly. In the 1950s and ‘60s people were far more deferential towards public figures than was good for the latter; which is what fired the modern political satire movement (with Beyond the Fringe and Private Eye), through whose lens almost the whole of politics has come to be viewed today. Present-day media stars like Paxman, Humphreys and Hislop – cynical, suspicious, aggressive, often unfair – are its spawn. (Entertaining spawn, of course; which is what gives them their media appeal.) They were joined by the press: tabloid at first, thumbing their noses at their ‘betters’, then catching on with the broadsheets. This may have dissuaded good men and women from entering politics, which of course will have degraded the stock. Still, it didn’t dissuade Jo.

The causes of this growing distrust of the political class, apart from the bad conduct of a section of it, and satire, are many and complicated. Lack of political education in schools, perhaps? The unrepresentative nature of our parliamentary democracy? (See https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/.) General discontent, due to many things – I would say mainly the failures of unrestrained capitalism – but which can too easily be blamed on our MPs? Anti-intellectualism, illustrated this last week by Michael Gove’s dismissal of all ‘experts’, which encourages emotional reaction rather than rational thought? The coarsening of society generally, reflected in – and perhaps fuelled by – the ‘blogosphere’? (See my earlier post on ‘btl’ trolls: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/btl/.) Misogyny, in the case of women MPs, again nausiatingly expressed ‘btl’? And I’m sure that many of us could suggest other possibilities.

Another way to approach it is to ask the old lawyer’s question, cui bono? Who stands to gain by this devaluing of democracy, parliament and MPs? In the past it has generally been dictators or putative dictators; who could still profit from it today, and may do, if a suitable candidate turns up: as he has already done, it seems, in the United States. But there is one other interest that also stands to gain from the undermining of democracy. That’s capitalism. Capitalism preaches that everything should be decided by the ‘laws’ of the market, and not by the political decisions of men and women. If the decisions of men and women, or the means of expressing them, a.k.a. ‘democracy’, can be undermined, by propaganda or in any other way, it leaves the way clear for predatory profiteers. We know that the popular press by now has become an arm of capitalism, rather than of enlightenment, as it boasted of being in the nineteenth century, with newspapers and other media outlets concerned to maximize profits above everything. It’s this that distorts its coverage, usually by sensationalizing things. It’s also what renders it in the press’s clear interest to undermine the only agencies that could control it. Most of the worst vitriol directed indiscriminately at MPs in recent years has come from newspapers owned by multi-national capitalists. That’s what Rupert Murdoch is basically all about.

I’m sorry if this reads like old-fashioned 1960s Leftism – which is certainly how the Murdoch press would describe it – but I still think that there are some things that the 1960s got right. That’s my theory. Our press might lie behind all this, as the mouthpiece of the triumphant capitalist behemoth.

It’s a small comfort, I know; but thank God it wasn’t a Muslim who murdered Jo Cox. Otherwise we wouldn’t hear the last of it from the Daily Mail. On that subject there’s an excellent piece in the Guardian this morning by Martin Kettle. (You might want to read it before you go on.)

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/17/eu-referendum-battle-press-versus-democracy

Of course it isn’t the Daily Mail either which is to blame for yesterday’s dreadful event. Or UKIP. Or our pretty vile social media. Or – necessarily – ‘Britain First’, the extreme right-wing party whose name Thomas Mair is reported to have shouted as he was attacking her (though we can’t yet be sure), and whose candidate for the London mayoral election notoriously turned his back on Sadiq Khan as the result of that election was announced.

But all are partly responsible for stirring up hatred against foreign refugees – one of Jo Cox’s favourite causes, on which she delivered her maiden speech in Parliament – and against politicians generally, over the past few years. Look at Farage’s latest referendum poster: millions of sinister Turks pictured queuing to enter Britain, with the slogan ‘Breaking Point’ (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breaking-point-poster-queue-of-migrants). And at the Right-wing press’s constant demeaning of even the best-intentioned of our MPs. (What better way is there of getting people to accept the primacy of the market over democracy?) Admixed with the rumbling popular discontents whose sources I tried to analyze in my last post, and probably working on a mentally unstable mind – we don’t know yet; but the Swedish papers are pointing out how similar this looks to the murder of their Anna Lindh in 2003 – this kind of thing furnishes a toxic soil out of which such hatred can sprout. As Jo Cox’s widower put it in his statement after her death, with impressive dignity and wisdom: ‘She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now: one that our precious children are bathed in love; and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn’t have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.’ And it is all too easy to stir up. Respectable politicians are already appealing to the most combative participants in the current referendum debate to smooth down the tone of their propaganda. We’ll see if that has any effect when the campaigning – interrupted just now out of respect – resumes.

Whether it was involved or not, ‘Britain First’ – and here’s its website, if anyone is interested, as I don’t suppose many of my readers will be: https://www.britainfirst.org – is a derisory organization in terms of numbers and real influence, as have been most of Britain’s fascist and neo-fascist parties historically. We pride ourselves on this; that adherents of Hitler and Mussolini had no real following in Britain before the last War, for example, by comparison with most Continental nations.

But in fact we have had a significant and influential fascist party all along. It’s not organized as a party, but has taken one key aspect of fascism – its propaganda – and built its considerable influence on that. It goes under the name of the Daily Mail. I first came across the Mail historically when I was researching British opinion towards the Boer War (1899-1902), when it was the most jingoistic of all the newspapers of the time; despite the fact that its South African correspondent, a chap called GW Steevens, was something of a ‘pro-Boer’, as opponents of the war were known then, who nonetheless trimmed his reports to satisfy the imperialistic prejudices of his proprietor, Lord Northcliffe. Northcliffe’s family still own the paper, I believe. We all know of their support for Hitler in the 1930s – ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ – and of the consistently right-wing, often deceitful and usually hate-filled lines they have plugged ever since. Newspapers can be as powerful as parties. If we in Britain haven’t had a significant and certainly not a continuous fascist party since the 1930s, the Daily Mail must be the nearest equivalent.

Hate really is poisonous. So I suppose I must learn to stop hating the hate-filled Daily Mail.

Whatever we think of referenda generally, this really was a terrible time to hold one. Hardly anyone was really interested in the EU before now, apart from a few Tory obsessives. The rest of us had come to accept it, as a fact of modern life. The things we felt strongly about were jobs, prospects, the people who ruled us, football, immigration, and who should be thrown out of the Big Brother house. (Is that right? I don’t watch it.) Europe came very low down this list. Which means that, when we are told we have to vote on this issue, our minds are on other things. And our stance on ‘Brexit’ or ‘Remain’ is determined by our opinions on those other things, rather than by the issue of Europe itself. Which might be fine if the European issue were central to any of these concerns. But it isn’t.

One of the major problems is that when we were last given a national vote, in the 2015 General Election, the result didn’t reflect our views. A Conservative government came to power, and started acting in a very Conservative way, on the basis of a ‘democratic’ mandate granted in fact by only 25% of the electorate, and 33% of those who voted. Our electoral system, of course, was to blame for that. (See below: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/.) This left millions of voters (and abstainers) discontented, and with a feeling of helplessness under the rules of the present electoral game.

This happened in a period of almost unprecedented economic depression for the great bulk of people; the unraveling of their welfare safety-net; widening social inequality; the almost daily revelations of various forms of gross corruption – mainly economic, but also moral – by the propertied and political classes and those they protect; the wholesale grab by those classes of what had used to be regarded as public assets (privatization), including, for example, basic social requirements such as water, education and health; the continuation in power of a class of men whose privileged education and lifestyles cut them off entirely from the mass of the people they are governing; the uncontrolled and unwelcome immigration of workers from within Europe and of refugees from outside; and – on top of all this – a new, alien and seemingly irrational terrorist threat, just when we thought we had put paid to the (relatively rational) Irish one. Behind all – or most – of this lies the apparently inexorable advance of the global capitalist hegemon, undermining democracy and taking power away from ordinary people; albeit in a way that only a few of us recognize.

It’s the non-recognition of this overwhelming factor, in fact, that is distorting the responses to our present situation. These are taking many forms. One is a turn to the Right – to Trump in America, UKIP in Britain, the FN in France, and so on. People’s anger is turned against scapegoats who are not really responsible for their woes, but are easily identified, and disliked for other reasons. Another is a turn in the opposite direction, to the Left: Occupy, Bernie, Jeremy, Podemos, and the multitude of other quasi-socialist movements that have sprung up recently. These sorts of reaction have historical form, of course, most notably in 1930s Europe. Opposites in one obvious way, they also share a common cause and origin, and in many cases curiously similar philosophies. Both Bernie and Donald, and both Jeremy and Nigel, rail against essential aspects of the free market capitalist system, for example, although in the cases of Trump and Farage there are obvious reasons to doubt their sincerity. They’re also professedly anti-‘establishment’, which is a great draw for those disillusioned by conventional politics. Other manifestations of this powerful but poorly-focused discontent are various forms of anarchism, ranging from political apathy among the young to its more ideological and destructive forms; nationalism; the Islamicisation of native-born Britons and Americans; the widely remarked on ‘toxicity’ of contemporary political discourse, for example on social media,  among people who feel disempowered, or politicians who pander to them; and even – possibly – the English ‘football’ hooliganism we are witnessing just now on the streets of France. All of this must be at least partly attributable to the spread of the effects of unconstrained capitalism among us, in the forms of austerity, inequality, and the primacy of commercial over democratic considerations – which is, of course, the main complaint against TTIP. (See below: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/05/22/why-not-a-referendum-on-ttip/.) Perhaps. But people don’t realize this. So when an opportunity for another national vote comes up – the referendum, the only truly democratic one they will be allowed until our voting system is fundamentally reformed – they funnel all their discontents into that.

But of course, they don’t really fit. The European Union is not the cause of all their woes. It may contribute to them. Since it became captured by the neo-liberal tendency, it has done little to arrest the progress of the Global hegemon. It has done something: enshrined a ‘social chapter’, for example, which offends fundamentally against neo-liberalism – and which is one of the aspects of the Union the Tory Brexiters want to get rid of. But its underlying principle of the free movement of labour is a neo-liberal one. (Incidentally, it was also fundamental principle of Britain in her days of ‘splendid isolation’ – see my last post but one – when anyone was allowed to come in. There were simply no border controls.) And the EU is still considering whether to accede to TTIP. Those of us who saw the old EEC as a possible bulwark against global capitalism have been gravely disabused. That’s clearly the main reason, and a pretty good one, for Leftists to be attracted to Brexit today.

The trouble is, for us Leftist Remainers, that Brexit probably won’t do the trick; won’t solve, that is, the major grouse we have, which isn’t against Europe per se. Just think: would a Brexit government be more or less likely to resist TTIP? Desperate to replace its European markets with American ones, and in view of most of the leading Brexiters’ known neo-liberal ideology, it might well be more likely to sign up. Might there not be a better hope of sinking it with the help of our European radical allies? Likewise, for those mainly interested in getting rid of the awful Cameron and Osborne, would a Johnson and Gove government be any better? Would those two – again in view of their neo-liberal ideologies – really want to restrict the immigration of cheap labour into Britain? I’m sorry, but I’m afraid the question really does need to be addressed ad hominem. Otherwise frying pans and fires leap to one’s mind. It’s a question not of principle, but of tactics.

That’s the basic problem with this referendum. It’s not about the issue that most people really care about. It’s a vital one, but muddied and complicated by all these others. This is not the time to vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union. But we’re saddled with it; so let’s see what comes of it. I for one will be sitting up all night next Thursday, to follow the results. I have to say that although I’ll be relieved by a Remain vote, I’ll be excited by a Brexit one. It’ll be different, unpredictable, and – dare I say it? – more fun.

Although I must admit that I have made tentative plans to emigrate to Sweden afterwards; in order to observe the effects from a safe – and civilised – distance.

Just a brief note on this guy. He’s in the news for claiming that the EU destroyed his Dad’s fishing business, when it didn’t. I was interested to learn that his father was in fishing; I always thought Gove’s face looked like a cod’s, which of course – as I was told when I tried to mention it in a newspaper article – is grossly unfair comment.

What gets me about Gove is his reputation as a bit of an intellectual, on the grounds, I believe, that he has ‘big’ ideas, and used to be a Times leader-writer. His speaking manner is very measured and certain, which seems to confirm this. In fact, whenever he pontificates on historical matters that I know something about, he is almost always wrong. The first time I noticed this was in his evidence to the Leveson committee on the press, where he tried to claim that the British press had always been as bad as it was said to have turned after Murdoch – and therefore always must be. (See below: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/the-decline-of-the-british-media/.) The second was when he told us he thought that accounts of the First World War taught in schools should be more heroic than they tended to be: in order to make the next generation ‘prouder’ of Britain. He especially castigated Blackadder Goes Forth. Anyone who has studied the ‘Great’ War in any detail knows that in fact Blackadder hit the spot pretty well.

During the current Referendum debate his contributions have been no more ‘intellectual’. He’s just as likely as any of the other main participants (on both sides) to twist his facts to fit his arguments. That’s not ‘intellectualism’; it’s prostituting one’s intellect (and Gove undoubtedly has one of those) for propaganda purposes. But then what more would you expect from an ex-leader writer on Murdoch’s Times?

More on the Referendum later.

I’m told by my Swedish friends that the view over there is that Britain’s current referendum debate is showing her up as ‘the stupidest nation on earth’. This is not primarily because she’s thinking of leaving. Although they would like us to stay in, or so they say – see Der Spiegel’s front cover this week: ‘Bitte geht nicht’ (http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/comment-on-brexit-it-s-smarter-to-stay-a-1096929.html) – Continentals can understand why Britain might not be entirely enamoured of the EU; especially the Swedes, as it happens, who also have their gripes. (See below: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/brexit-swexit/.) What they are shocked by is the level of our debate. Foreign commentary mainly focuses on David Cameron on the one side, ignoring Corbyn’s far more persuasive arguments entirely, which is of course just what the British press is doing, so we can’t really blame them; and on the three most prominent Brexiteers on the other. Foreigners really can’t comprehend Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Michael Gove. They’ve long been familiar with ‘English eccentrics’, of course, and even envious of them – Sweden in particular isn’t terribly good at eccentricity – but only as Ealing Comedy characters, and not as real actors in the modern world. The idea that a joker like Boris might become the prime minister of a major European country, if the vote goes right for him, is almost beyond their belief. (Except that they’ve seen it before, of course – in Italy.) That’s how our referendum is played out, certainly in the Swedish papers, and I guess all over the rest of Europe.

The particular issue that puzzles them most, however, is what the Brexiteers want the UK to leave the EU for: that is, where they see her ending up. That question has been raised here in Britain, too, innumerable times. The post-Brexit situation has never been clearly spelled out, with various scenarios being floated, airily, only to be pretty swiftly knocked down. The Norwegian option would still allow a non-EU Britain to trade with her former EU partners, but only at a cost, which would include adherence to the principle of free movement of labour, which of course is the aspect of the EU to which the anti-immigrant Brexiteers most object. So that’s out. Canada’s commercial arrangement with the EU is offered as an alternative, but that would take at least ten years to negotiate. The third solution sometimes suggested is the Swiss one, but apparently there’s something wrong with that too. (And it’s doubtful that Britain compares with Switzerland in many ways. Except their dodgy banks.) So Britain would have to find her own, separate, path. Some Brexiteers embrace this idea proudly. We would return, they say, to the ‘splendid isolation’ that was so beneficial to Britain in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, when she ruled herself – and lots of others – unrestricted by foreign interference, and could make her own choices of trading partners and allies. Which is where I, as a historian, feel I must chip in. (See my Britain, Europe and the World. Delusions of Grandeur, 1983.)

In fact ‘splendid isolation’ was always a myth. For the first half of the nineteenth century Britain was inextricably bound to Europe by what was called the ‘Balance of Power’: a multilateral system of mutual obligations by which European nations were deterred from attacking one another by the likelihood of retribution from all the others, united together. That kept the peace, roughly, for five decades after Waterloo, albeit not in the rest of the world, which was where Britain, France and the other participants in the ‘Balance’ turned their attention, imperially. Back in Europe, the ‘Balance’ broke down in the later nineteenth century, making things ominous for Britain in particular, threatened as she was by the superior armies of first France and then Germany, who were now released from their ‘balancing’ obligations to attack the much weaker Britain if they wished. It was then, and only then – in 1896, to be precise – that the term ‘splendid isolation’ was dreamt up, to seem to make a virtue of necessity: Britain was ‘isolated’ not because the rest of Europe spurned her, but out of choice. It was a bit like the notorious Millwall FC chant: ‘Nobody likes us and we don’t care’. It was widely felt to be dangerous; and was. With this particular ‘union’ dismantled, Europe divided into two rival camps, in the bilateral system of ‘ententes’ that gave rise to World War I. Britain’s ‘splendid isolation’ couldn’t prevent her from being dragged into that, or its successor.

After World War II Britain withdrew into a kind of isolation, trade-wise; but even that was not the sort of isolation the Brexiteers are envisaging today. For a start, she had her Commonwealth, which comprised a vast commercial union comparable to the ‘Common Market’ that Monet and his chums were setting up in Europe, and which cushioned her against what the real effects of ‘isolation’ might have been. That is no longer an option today. Or so we hope.

In fact real ‘isolation’ in today’s world is virtually impossible. (Maybe there’s an Amazonian tribe or two that have held on to theirs.) ‘No man is an island’, wrote John Donne; to which we might add that no island is an island either. Even outside the European Union the UK would be at the mercy of external forces not of her strict choosing: international obligations she would still have to adhere to, of course; and even more than that, the great hegemonic monster of global capitalism, waiting to gobble up any fish that strays from the shoal. The UK would be even less likely to be able to resist that alone than in company with others: which is my wish for a reformed EU, though I’m not optimistic. Even if it could, does anyone think that Messrs Johnson, Farage and Gove – neo-Liberals all of them, underneath – would want to? Or that they could be constrained by an ‘independent’ parliament?

Of course historical precedents are not the only guides we have to the future, attractive as they may seem to the literal reactionaries who make up a part (not all) of Brexit’s support. Times change. Maybe an independent UK, striking out bravely on its own, might find a brand new way of dealing with the world situation that will confront it. In which case the Brexiteers may not be quite so stupid as the Swedish press thinks them. But they still need to spell it out, if they can.

*

But then: is this Referendum really about Europe? If it could be shown not to be, then the debate might make more sense to my Swedish friends. I’ll return to this.

A good letter in today’s Guardian, referencing both the EU referendum and English football, with a nice historical angle.

Once the feelings of shame and disgust have subsided (England and Russia fans clash before and after match, 12 June), one is left with a melancholy sense of the aptness of this dust-up. Here are two countries, each on the fringes of a continent towards which they are, historically, at best ambivalent. Each is blighted by a seemingly ineradicable strain of thuggish xenophobia. And each is retarded by an infantile yearning for lost world power status. If we were stupid enough to leave the EU and find ourselves obliged to try and stitch up some trade deal with Putin’s Russia, it would be about what we deserve.

Emeritus Professor Glyn Turton

Shipley, West Yorkshire

My own post-Worcester thoughts to follow.

An exciting time to return to England – two greedy capitalists in huge trouble (Mike Ashley of Sports Direct, for exploiting his workers shamelessly and illegally; Sir Philip Green of BHS for probably robbing his failing firm’s pension fund to buy more yachts [see below, https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/bhs-and-a-victorian-villain/]: both under scrutiny from Commons Committees – such fun to see them squirm on TV); new depths plumbed in the great EU referendum debate, especially by Nigel Farage, who is now playing the racist-feminist card: Brexit in order to stop foreign rapists coming in; and an unholy cock-up by the govt preventing – it seemed for a while – many young people from registering to vote in said referendum.

But I’ll be tied up for a few days, on a local ‘Elgar Society’ tour of Worcestershire, so probably won’t be able to comment for a wee while. This whole referendum thing, which isn’t just about Europe, could have a profound effect both on Europe and on British politics; and the business scandals an effect on the future of capitalism, if we’re (very) lucky. This may be what we historians don’t like to call a (or an) ‘historic moment’. I’m sure I’ll find something to write about it all – or, if not, then about Elgar – next week.

PS: and yet another capitalist gets his come-uppance.  https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/09/boots-uk-boss-simon-roberts-quits.

According to polls, it’s the over-50s that will be voting predominantly for Brexit, and the under 25s who overwhelmingly favour Remain; but – and here’s the rub – the under-25s are less likely to vote. That could give victory to Brexit. All the more credit to the Labour Party, therefore, for its vigorous campaign to get the under-25 vote out, which could be the key.  The Conservative Remainers are seen nowhere in this particular campaign, which may be all to the good, bearing in mind how unpopular, even toxic, Cameron, Osborne et al are among the young. (I liked that young woman’s interruption of Cameron in the live TV question-and-answer session a few nights ago: ‘I’m a student of English literature, and I can tell waffle when I see it.’ Cameron goes a brighter shade of pink…) Labour is criticized for not weighing in with more big speeches, but speeches aren’t going to do the trick, especially when their arguments are so tendentious, on both sides. Everyone sees that. It has almost become the main theme of the campaign. It might even discourage voting. Countering that, by getting the young registering and out to the polls, is clearly a better way.

Personally I think that even if I weren’t (marginally) pro-Remain in any case, I might vote that way; simply on the grounds that the young will live to endure the consequences of our decision longer than we oldies, and so should be allowed a greater say. If they can bother.