Porter’s Pensées

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.)

My original hope for the EU, though it wasn’t an altogether confident one, was that it might act as a barrier to the relentless global spread of free market capitalism, which is, after all, the dominant trend in the world today, and in my opinion a deeply problematical one. One of my reasons for thinking this derived from history: the fact that Britain and America had invented, or at least were the original crucibles for, the free market system and the ideology behind it, and were the keenest zealots for it today, whereas most of continental Europe had always been more ‘statist’, and so had taken to this system and the assumptions behind it rather less enthusiastically: until the behemoth had started to bite into even its most social-democratic economies, like Sweden’s, from the 1990s-on. With Continental allies like these, I thought, we Leftists in Britain might stand a chance of pushing the monster back; which was the main reason also why I feared Britain’s exit from Europe, which would enable the Brexiteers to push Britain, liberated from – for example – the EU’s Social Chapter, even further in a ‘new liberal’ direction. At the time that I voted for ‘Remain’, I have to say that I wondered whether I wasn’t entirely fooling myself here. Europe seemed to be capitulating to the enemy in almost every way, climaxing in the Eurozone’s near destruction of Greece for essentially free marketist reasons. The battle was hopeless.

This last week, however, two things have happened to revive my hopes. The first is yesterday’s EU’s ruling on Apple’s tax arrangements, and Ireland’s tax regime, which has been met, predictably, with howls of rage from Apple itself, the government of Ireland and in America; all of whom clearly believe that capitalists have no social responsibilities to the countries they do most of their business in (how many i-Pads are made or sold in Knocknaheeny, its base for taxation purposes?), which of course is the ‘free’ trade way. That’s huge – if it survives the inevitable well-funded appeals – and should do a little to restore the balance between big business and the voter, or capitalism and democracy, which globalisation has so skewed in recent years. The second ray of light is the clutch of reports coming out recently that TTIP – another attempt to assert the primacy of business methods and profit over the will of the people – is struggling to find acceptance among EU nations, with the opposition this time led by France. Apparently TTIP may, against all expectations, never come about. In both these matters it’s the collective power of the EU that has had these effects.

So-called ‘independent’ nations would never have this clout. Which leaves Britain much weakened: more able and willing, in her economically straightened condition, to supplant Ireland as a ‘tax refuge’ (in effect); and much more likely to accept a TTIP-type treaty on her own. Certainly our present leaders don’t appear ideologically averse to this – they’ve supported TTIP far more enthusiastically than most governments, and are presently expressing their dissent from the Apple ruling; and they might be forced into it, if only to save Britain’s bacon if the European single market spurns her. And then will follow all the other natural concomitants of free marketist fundamentalism: the rich getting richer (in finance), the poor growing poorer (in what is left of industry), controls on the exploitation of labour lifted, more privatizations… and all the rest.

If only we were back in the EU… On the other hand, if we were, the EU might not have been able to be so radical, held back as it might be by our free market zeal. Has Brexit liberated it, at the same time as subjecting us to the behemoth?

Has Ed Balls ever specified what it is about Jeremy Corbyn’s programme for government which makes it ‘a leftist utopian fantasy devoid of connection to the reality of people’s lives’? I’ve followed the debate pretty closely (even from Sweden) and not spotted anything in what he’s said that can’t be defended as reasonable and practical, and which indeed has been implemented successfully elsewhere in the world (some of it in Scandinavia), and once used to be mainstream Labour policy, before the irrational faith in ‘market’ solutions began to dominate the public discourse, and to infect Labour. Precisely which of Corbyn’s policies are utopian, fantastical, and irrelevant to ordinary people? I’d like to know.

But of course if you attack Corbyn you don’t have to be specific; merely to smear him with words which are thought to resonate negatively with people, and leave it at that. That’s the way political debate is carried on these days. There’s no longer any rational argument – from the anti-Corbyn side, at least. It’s assumed that people can’t cope with evidence, or with joined-up thinking any more. I imagine that the rise of advertising, and of the techniques of propaganda and ‘public relations’, reacting on short-term attention spans, has a lot to do with that. People are won over by ‘impressions’, which can be manipulated by headlines and even pictures. Not everyone is fooled; but enough are for the approach to work.

Corbyn isn’t an ideal leader of the Labour Party. I’ve given it as my opinion before (https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/07/06/2710/) that I’d like him replaced eventually, but only after his new policies and approach to politics – fair, polite, rational – have permeated the party deeply enough for people to appreciate their superiority over the old PR ways. Ideally I would have liked Labour MPs to stick with him until that task was complete. Those who have rebelled against him have done the party an immense disservice. After his ideas had bedded down, they could have replaced him – with a more convincing leader, I hope, than his present rival. Maybe a better quality of Labour MP would have emerged by then. But I imagine that’s unlikely now. Perhaps that’s what Balls means by ‘utopian’.

In the meantime I’ve cast my vote for Jeremy; not only because I agree with almost all he says and how he says it, and because of his courage and strength in soldiering on in the face of his appalling traducers; but also because he represents a style of political discourse and debate – calm, reasonable, joined-up, rejecting ad hominem (or feminem) point-scoring – which any scholar and academic, which I’m afraid I am, should support. I’m told he never went to university. But his way of presenting and discussing issues accords far more closely with what we university teachers try to instill in our students, than the Machiavelli-like ways that some of his Oxford-educated opponents appear to have picked up at their university. Corbyn ought to be the academic’s natural choice.

While in Sweden my website let me down. It wouldn’t let me post or edit. But my son-in-law Richard has fixed it – it involved switching from Safari to a thing called Google Chrome – and so, if this post works, I shall be able to resume my activity soon. Once I’ve shaken the democratic dust of Sweden from my shoes.

There was a huge crowd to hear Jeremy Corbyn in Queen’s Gardens yesterday; the biggest gathering any of us had ever seen in Hull. All sorts of people: young, old, men, women, ‘workers’, professionals, white, black, a few Trotskyites (of course), but mainly people like you and me. A fine speech by Corbyn, after an entertaining supporting programme: a Billy Bragg-like singer, and contributions (one a real rabble-rouser!) by some locals. It was on regional TV news briefly last night, and got a mention in today’s Observer; but in a report concentrating on a (false) charge that Corbyn was refusing to debate directly with his challenger (Owen something?), and nowhere mentioning the sheer size and enthusiasm of the meeting. Otherwise it was the usual curled-lip press sniping. You’ll know whom I’m going to vote for in the Labour leadership election.

When I was eight years old I was sent – alone – to a residential school for children with serious chest complaints, mainly TB and asthma, in Ventnor, Isle of Wight. It was the most miserable three months of my young life. It was run by Anglican nuns, all dressed in black, looking I thought like ravens, and strict to the point of cruelty. Brought up a Methodist, I had never seen nuns before. Parents weren’t supposed to visit. We could write home to them weekly, but only letters copied from the blackboard, telling them how happy we were. We knew these were vetted before posting. I devised a cunning code to counter this, which eventually worked; after those three months my father came to rescue me.

I had blotted this whole experience from my mind, until very recently, when I discovered some of my letters home in my late mother’s effects, and looked up the place – ‘St Catherine’s Open-Air School’ – via Google, where I found a number of reminiscences that sadly mirrored my own. One told of an ‘escape’ attempt by a group of older boys; ‘two of us reached the mainland’. Echoes of Colditz! So it wasn’t ‘just me’.

I’ve never wanted to revisit the Isle of Wight since, or even allowed myself to think of it: a psychological safety-mechanism, no doubt. Last week, however, Kajsa and I went there, as part of our South Coast tour, and looked up St Catherine’s. A kind school secretary showed us around. It has obviously changed enormously since the late ’40s. It now caters for children with other kinds of disabilities, and seems bright and friendly. And we didn’t spot a single nun there. I’m glad I went. It exorcised a ghost.

The episode did nothing at the time for my chronic asthma, which I continued to be afflicted with for years afterwards. I suppose I should be grateful – after all that has been revealed recently – that I wasn’t sexually abused there; unless the nuns’ ‘slippering’ of us on our bare bottoms gave them some erotic satisfaction. If so they were welcome to it. It must be awful being a nun.

And I really don’t think the experience had any lasting psychological effect on me. Unless it was to feed into two of my later prejudices: firstly against Public boarding schools; and secondly against the Catholic and ‘High’ Anglican churches. Those nuns! I still shiver when I see a nun in the street. Or a Muslim woman in full burkah, which reminds me of them. Which is not to say that either prejudice is unreasonable in itself. Just that in my case, they’re personal, too.

MI5 has a record of targeting left-wing MPs and parties in Britain, sometimes via retired agents and third parties. The best known examples are the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ affair of 1924, and the ‘Wilson plot’ (that is, the anti-Wilson plot) of 1974-6. (See my Plots and Paranoia, 1989.) So I wouldn’t reject Len McCluskey’s suspicions out of hand.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/22/intelligence-services-using-dark-practices-against-jeremy-corbyn.

What usually happens in these cases is that the charges are dismissed by the authorities at the time as the crazed ravings of ‘conspiracy theorists’. No-one wants to be labelled a conspiracy theorist – and there are, in truth, some real nutters among them, especially on the web – so respectable people are reluctant to countenance such claims. Then, thirty years later, when the archives are opened, the suspicions are shown to have been pretty well justified; by which time, of course, it’s too late.

Just saying.