Porter’s Pensées

Happy Swedish National Day tomorrow! It celebrates their liberation from the Danes in 1523. Curious people the Danes: mild and friendly today, Lego, Hans Christian Anderson, lovely open sandwiches…  But 500-1000 years ago they were bloodthirsty monsters, stabbing, axeing, gouging out people’s eyes, cutting off their privates, beheading 80+ Swedish nobles and clergy  in the infamous Stockholms Blodbad  (1520); that’s years after the end of the Viking age, when my ancestors in eastern England were their terrified victims. It proves the point I’ve made before in connexion with British imperialism: it’s not people’s nationality that makes them awful, or – on the other hand – nice, but the circumstances of their time and place. I’m sure I’d have been awful then. (Or dead.)

Swedes of course are different. Always peaceful and Social Democratic underneath, even if they didn’t know it. Even their Vikings were just peaceful traders, in the East. (Traders in slaves, that is. I’m being ironic.) So I hope they enjoy their Nationaldag. I won’t. The pub on our island is closed. How can you celebrate a national day without beer?

It shows to what depths the perception and coverage of British politics has sunk just now when everything is perceived in terms of personal advantage and cynical strategy. ‘Why has he taken that side rather than the other?’ Obviously because he’s looking to lead his party in the future. ‘Why has she changed her mind on this or that issue?’ Clearly because she thinks it will get her new friends. ‘Why does he seem to have abandoned principles he espoused forty years ago?’ Self-evidently because he’s not a man of principle at all, but a hypocritical opportunist, just like all the rest. ‘Why is politics so despised amongst ordinary people?’ That’s why.

As an academic, and it may be only because I’m an academic, I find this way of thinking depressing. In some cases the charge of cynicism may be justified: I wouldn’t trust Boris further than I could throw him, for example (and with my arthritis that’s not very far nowadays). Too many politicians are merely tacticians, playing politics like a game. Public school probably does that to you, as the only way of keeping your head above water, as you try to swim against the social tide. Blair was a master at this sport. And of course he was a success, by the rules of the game.

But changing your mind, or choosing one team to play for rather than another, doesn’t imply this necessarily. In my field it’s considered to be a mark of intellectual honesty and moral virtue if we change or modify our theories in accordance with new times or new evidence. Sticking rigidly to a view I formed forty years ago would not be a reason for others to trust my judgment on historical matters today. As long, that is, as I had good reason to change my view. If so, then it would be ludicrous if people regarded me as less ‘principled’ for that reason alone; and insulting if they assumed I had changed my mind for personal career reasons, or in order to make friends. There may be some academics like that, but I would not accuse even my sworn scholarly enemies – Niall Ferguson, for example – of forming their views simply in order to better their positions.

So it annoys me when Corbyn’s critics harp on the fact that he used to be anti-the EU forty years ago, yet is campaigning on the ‘Remain’ side today. It’s obvious from everything he’s been saying recently that he is still just as hostile to the EU as present constituted – as a neo-liberal scam – as he was back in the 1970s. That’s the principle behind his hostility: not an anti-European, but an anti-capitalist one. It’s mine too. We’re both sticking to it. The question now, therefore, is which way to vote in order to damage neo-liberalism and restore some socialism to Europe. That’s not a matter of principle, but a judgment call. Is Brexit the way – paving the way for an even more neo-liberal government in Britain, while doing nothing to help the socialist cause on the Continent? Or staying in, with a fairly good chance (I’d say) of Labour’s forming a British government some time afterwards, which could then work with the burgeoning anti-austerity movement in Europe, to – for a start – scuttle TTIP? You may think this is a naive hope, as it may well be; but in that case it’s simply a misjudgment, not a betrayal.

It’s a fine choice, and the answer isn’t obvious. But it’s clearly one that shouldn’t be dictated by the position one reached all those years ago, without any thought – the sort of thing we academics engage in all the time – being applied to it. That’s a lazy way of coming to judgments, and of judging the judgments come to by others.

Further to my last post: there’s a good account of Corbyn’s major European speech today on the Guardian website: (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/02/jeremy-corbyn-uk-cannot-must-not-close-borders-to-eu-workers). Clear, strong, nuanced and principled, in my view, and surely good enough for anyone who complains that he isn’t stating his position forcefully enough, as his critics do. But the Guardian chose to lead – again, if its webpage is anything to go by – with a triviality: his audiences’s mild and very brief hissing, until Corbyn raised his hand for silence, of Laura Kuenssberg, who surely deserves it (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/02/jeremy-corbyn-supporters-boo-bbcs-laura-kuenssberg); which the Guardian implied was another example of Labour ‘misogyny’, and which she chose to take as an attack on ‘press freedom’, for mercy’s sake!  I’ve never complained of BBC right-wing (or Blairite) bias before, but I’m now beginning to despair of the Guardian, as well as of the BBC. What is left for us moderate Left-Wingers? How do we prick ‘the Bubble’?

PS (next day): Corbyn has also pledged that a Labour Govt within the EU would sink TTIP. (See below, https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/05/22/why-not-a-referendum-on-ttip/.) That’s my guy! Can you imagine Boris Johnson doing that after Brexit?

So, if Brexit wins on the 23rd, it’s all Corbyn’s fault!  (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/01/jeremy-corbyn-pro-immigration-case-eu-referendum-gmb-union-tim-roache.) That’s what they were all saying too on this morning’s Today programme (which I listen to in Sweden on my iPhone: wonderful!), whose presenters are really quite incredibly biased against Corbyn. The awful Laura Kuenssberg popped up there again. (See below, https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/criticism-and-sexism/). ‘Awful’, I feel I must add, not because of her gender.

I imagine this latest line of theirs is just another way of getting at him. Never mind the open warfare in the Tory party, and the dog’s dinner that the Remain side is making of its case. It’s all because Jeremy isn’t being ‘bold’ enough. But, as I’ve commented before, why should he be? (https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/04/19/jeremy-and-europe/). If he’s genuinely luke-warm about the EU, and favours Remain as simply the lesser of two evils, as I do, should he pretend to be more enthusiastic than he really feels, just for the sake of ‘presentation’? It’s up to the enthusiasts to be enthusiastic, surely. And for calmer people to make a more nuanced, rational case.

Both the Left and the Right criticise Corbyn for reneging on his former Eurosceptic principles, by backing ‘Remain’ today. The implication is that he’s just as opportunist and hypocritical as all the rest. ‘Where’s the New Politics, then?’ Well, it’s there: judging issues on their merits, taking account of changing circumstances, and of the effects of the alternative policies to the ones one is now backing – e.g. a Boris-led, sub-Trumpian government – rather than sticking too rigidly to 40 year-old guns. And remember that ‘Euroscepticism’ means, literally, having doubts about the EU, not being immovably opposed to it. Corbyn is still a Eurosceptic in this sense.

Through our membership of the EU and by working with other progressive forces in Europe we have strengthened the rights of workers in Britain and across the continent. If we vote leave there would be a bonfire of workers’ rights as the Tories negotiated our exit. Our vision is for a social Europe – where people, not corporations – are at its heart.

That’s both sceptical and pro.

It’s a long time since we’ve had as honest and rational a party leader in Britain as Corbyn, which is why perhaps the ‘Westminster Bubble’ can’t get its collective head around him. They criticise him for not sharing a common platform with David Cameron, contrasting him here with the new Labour London mayor, who did agree to ‘share’. What difference the mere sharing of a platform is likely to make, if both leaders speak in favour of ‘Remain’ independently, is not clear. The two of them are obviously in favour of radically different kinds of Europe, as the Corbyn quote above shows. So their cases need to be aired separately.

When Cameron hob-nobbed with Khan, he lauded him for being a moderate Muslim, a true Brit and a genuine Londoner;  just a week or two after smearing him with a supposed association with Islamic terrorists, in order to win the London mayoral contest for his guy. Now there’s opportunism and hypocrisy if you like! But then look at Cameron’s background – in ‘Public Relations’. Never trust a PR man, even an Eton and Oxford-educated one. Old bearded Lefties are usually more genuine and thoughtful. They need to make their own case. The question before us just now is not straightforward. I’d rather back someone who recognises that.

Post taken down! Since writing it I’ve read up some more, and realised how inadequate it was. That’s the problem with instant publication.

I woke up this morning thoroughly depressed, as I have been since I finished my last book, with no other writing on the go, apart from the occasional review and this unread blog; when Kajsa cheered me up with a suggestion. ‘Why don’t you write a history of Sweden for English readers? I could help you.’ – Too old to have babies together, I thought this might do the trick. So I started.

I thought I could use this blog in order to keep my few ‘followers’ apprised of my progress.  (As well as the usual stuff about politics and football.) You might want to comment on it, and correct me. It will only be a preliminary version, of course: I usually write at least three drafts of any of my books; but it will help you, and me, to know where I’m going with this. Here’s the first draft of the Intro. I’ll be submitting it to a publisher soon.

*

A Short History of Sweden for Anglos

Bernard Porter and Kajsa Ohrlander

INTRODUCTION

All things considered – the climate, the dark winters, the rocky terrain, the small population, the lack of any natural resources apart from iron and timber, the early history of feudal tyranny, savage wars and poverty, the awful food, and, some neoliberals might add, the socialism – Sweden has done pretty well over the past hundred-odd years, both for itself and, I would say, for others. It boasts one of the most productive and prosperous economies on earth, and also probably the most equal society, particularly as regards gender. It is fundamentally democratic in most respects, unlike Britain, and stable. Its people are more law-abiding than most, and this despite its prisons being comfortable, so hardly a deterrent, and largely empty. Swedes are also more moral – as morality should be defined – than more overtly religious peoples. Americans and right-wing Britons can scarcely credit this. They probably think the country is hiding its horrors, to be revealed for what they are only in its ‘Noir’ crime novels. Not so. Its long summer days are something special – fully compensating for the winters. Swedish culture is flourishing, at every ‘level’, but especially cinema, literature and design. Swedes are generous to a fault towards foreign refugees, and friendly to non-oppressed foreign residents, like myself. All this is rather over-egged, of course, and the country is not quite the Utopia I used to imagine it as a young British Labour Party member in the 1960s, when it was Sweden that was our ‘shining city on the hill’; but it comes pretty close. Its people have done much good in the world, especially in spreading internationalism and flat-pack furniture; and its social relations could serve as a model for all us non-Swedes, if only we could get certain prejudices – for example about the ‘State’ – out of our heads. The Utopia might not last much longer. Already the monster of ‘globalisation’ is nibbling away at its edges. Volvo and Saab are in foreign ownership. Schools are being privatized. The National Health system seems to stop at teeth. But at present, Sweden is still a pretty good place to live.

So: how did it get from there – fighting, poverty, tyranny, eating raw herring and the barks of trees – to here? That’s what I have been musing on during the twenty years I’ve lived in Sweden (on and off), and have now decided to write this book about, for Anglophone readers. The idea came from my ‘sambo’ Kajsa – the Swedes have even found a neutral word for couples who aren’t formally married – who is my co-author in effect. She thought it might relieve my post-natal depression, after having delivered what I had thought was my final book. She makes up for my poor (OK: almost non-existent) Swedish, and of course will contribute her lifetime’s inside knowledge and research. She works in the field of Gender Studies, especially as applied to Swedish education, whose early 20^th-century history she has written about.^fn We share roughly the same political and social views. (She’s a bit more ‘advanced’ than I.) What I bring to the subject is an outsider’s perspective, but one steeped in a very wide-ranging study of history – my main area has been ‘British imperial’, but I’ve touched before on the topic of early British attitudes to Scandinavia – and a certain facile writing style. I also, of course, know, or think I know, what it is about Swedish history that will puzzle, interest and enlighten British and American readers, who are our main intended audience. Any Swede who has stumbled on this book by mistake should put it down now. It’s not for you. – Although, on second thoughts: ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us!’ (Robbie Burns. Swedes may need to go to Google Translate.) So they might learn something.

As is the case with most images of foreigners formed abroad, how we British see the Swedes probably says more about us than it does about them. The same, of course, applies the other way around. When I first met Kajsa she seemed to me to see everything English through a Swedish lens, which was sometimes flattering, but usually not. Fortunately I shared her unflattering view of England to some extent, so I could understand where she was coming from, and work from that. (She’s progressing. She has now taken to English Ale.) This book will aim to do something similar, but the other way around. Aware of what the dominant discourses in Britain are about politics, history, family, work, play, sex and a host of other things, I’ll be able to translate; to place Swedish history in a context and a language that Anglo-Americans will understand – both Kajsa and I have lived for some time in the USA, by the way – and will be fair to her mother country and my adopted one.

This is one of the ways this book will be different from other English-language histories or accounts of Sweden. We’re also hoping that it may prove less superficial than are many ‘travel books’ about Sweden; as they have been, in fact, since the travelogue genre began. No modern names, no pack-drill; but I can refer readers here to my own studies of nineteenth century British travel-writers about Scandinavia.^fn Swedish stereotypes can be amusing, but they are not always fair. (Just as Swedes themselves are not usually fair-haired, especially these days.) To understand a country it’s not enough merely to have visited it; just as, I would contend, it’s not enough only to have lived there all one’s life. That gives you no perspective. Kajsa’s and my account, we hope, will. She’ll provide the depth, I the context. That’s our intention, at any rate, and our justification for this book.

It will be organized roughly chronologically, beginning in the mists of time, which are particularly misty in the case of Scandinavia. Sweden doesn’t really have any history before the Middle Ages, whereas we in Britain have Stonehenge and the Romans. It will then canter on at quite a pace until it reaches relatively modern times, and concentrate on the last two centuries. These are more important than Sweden’s ‘Game of Thrones’ pre-history (or mythology) for understanding how the country came to be as it is now; which is what Kajsa and I, and I presume our readers, are most interested in. (There is a real ‘Westeros’ in Sweden, by the way. Ryanair fly there.) And both of us are more comfortable, as historians rather than prehistorians, with peoples who have learned to read and write.

END (Apart from Acknowledgments)

This blog is getting too political, and too serious. But History can also be fun. One way is to imagine ‘hypothetical histories’ – how we (or they) might have turned out if a key event in the past had not happened: if the Reformation had failed in northern Europe, for example; or Wellington had lost the Battle of Waterloo; or baby Adolf had choked to death on his first bowl of sauerkraut. A friend of mine, Chris Andrew, once devised a series of radio programmes along these lines – I think it was called ‘What If?’ ‘What if?’ history has become quite a novelistic genre: off the top of my head I can remember Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration (the counter-reformation has won, Harold Wilson is a cardinal); Robert Harris’s Fatherland (Germany wins World War II); a science fiction tale in which the Victorians have invented the atomic bomb; and another in which the Neanderthals managed to fight off the Cro-Magnons. (I’m sorry I can’t remember the details.)

Serious historians tend to scorn this sort of thing, and with good reason: it probably attributes too much agency to single events. If Hitler had died in infancy would everything have been the same but with no Nazism? Or might not someone similar have taken his place? How can we possibly assess the indirect side-effects of these ‘alterations’, complex and entangled as they would likely be? Would a Saxon England after a Haroldian victory in 1066 have been very different from how it turned out? (Norman culture was already spreading.) If Margaret Roberts had stayed on in Grantham to take over her father’s shop, isn’t it likely that some other leader would have taken Britain in the same disastrous direction as she did? And so on. As soon as you push on just a few moments beyond the supposed ‘alteration’, everything is unpredictable. So ‘hypothetical history’ is not of any very great value; except that it can remind us that alternative evolutions were and therefore are possible. Our history is not set in stone.

Still, it’s a diverting game to play, especially for world-weary historians; and yesterday a Swedish-American friend of ours, Per Kullstam, suggested another interesting scenario. We were discussing the Vikings, as Brits and Swedes often do; with me it usually starts with them castigating British imperialism (they know it’s my ‘subject’), so that I have to retaliate by reminding them of their own bloody past. (And no, I won’t accept that that was just the Danes and Norwegians, with the Swedish Vikings being the cuddly Social-Democratic ones.) I told Per about a recent British TV documentary purporting to show that the Vikings penetrated further into north America – ‘Vinland’: so perhaps warmer then? – than we had used to think. And Per came up with this idea: what if those early Vikings had succeeded in colonising the ‘New World’ then, and survived for longer, wouldn’t it have been better for European-Native American relations thereafter, with both civilisations being at roughly the same stage technologically when they met, so that the Europeans didn’t have the terrible advantage they later had of guns?

But then I thought: why did the Viking settlements die out in North America – as they did also, at certain times, in Greenland and Iceland? Could it have been that the Native Americans’ technology was superior to theirs (except, obviously, in boat-building) – only marginally, perhaps, but enough to make a difference? And then what about the factor of disease? This is now believed to be the crucial element in depopulating both the Americas from the 16^th century onwards: diseases brought over by Europeans to which the latter had a natural immunity, but the Americans didn’t. That could have worked the other way around, too, with diseases indigenous to the voyagers’ new-found land wiping them all out. Maybe we’ll find out soon, if they can find some Norwegian bones up the Delaware.

*

Perhaps I should have a DNA test, to see if I have any Scandinavian ‘blood’. That would bring me closer to my neighbours here in Stockholm, and to Kajsa (though in her case the Swedish DNA has been defiled by Walloon). I wouldn’t be surprised. My family has mostly come from the east of England – part of Kung Knut’s old ‘Danelaw’. I can just imagine a marauding Viking warrior raping a fair young Anglo-Saxon maid a thousand years ago to give rise to the original Porter clan. That’s bound to have happened – albeit more consensually, we hope – on a pretty wide scale. Perhaps it’s the Viking DNA that made us Brits into imperialists. So that’s their fault, too.

All the talk in the Westminster Bubble these days – according to my reading of the metropolitan press, which of course is part of the Bubble itself – is about what damage the current Conservative divisions over Europe will do to the party in the longer term. Dire outcomes are predicted, and either feared or joyously anticipated, according to which side of the party line you stand.

We’ve been here before – we British historians, that is. All the great parties in the land have come apart at the seams at one time or another, and very often over issues quite similar to the present one. In 1846 the division in the Tory party over Free Trade (the Corn Laws) saw the end of the century-old divide between Whigs and Tories, and its replacement by a new Liberal-Conservative one. (They were sometimes still called Whigs and Tories, but they really weren’t.) After that the Liberals ruled virtually unchallenged for two or three decades, until Disraeli – after giving in to the logic of Free Trade – revived the Conservatives. ‘Free Trade’, of course, is one of the issues in the present debate. In the 1880s and 1890s the Liberals split over the question of ‘imperialism’, which also involved trade matters, with about 60 forming a new party, the ‘Liberal Unionists’, which later defected to the Conservatives. That gave the latter a similar stretch of domination, lasting until they foolishly backed the idea of an ‘imperial customs union’ – a bit like the present European one; leading to more defections (including Winston Churchill) and their defeat in 1906. The next big split, in the Liberal Party again, was over something different: basically, the First World War. That enabled the Liberals’ eventual replacement by the Labour Party, whose own splits, over the economy, defence and later Europe, proved not to be permanently disabling, until the SDP defection of 1981. That undoubtedly redounded to the advantage of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party, and to her record-breaking stretch in power. The SDP later merged with the Liberal rump. Its only positive gain from this (so far) was a short period of largely ineffective shared government with David Cameron’s Conservatives, which is still fresh in all our minds. But now the Tories are splitting again. Plus ça change…

The eighteenth-century ‘party system’ was originally intended to give some stability to democratic politics, by removing the uncertainties that allowing every MP to vote on each issue according to his (or later her) own proclivities or interests inevitably entailed. It does this pretty well in ‘normal’ times. Before most votes in Parliament, it is possible to predict which way they will go by numbering the strengths of the parties on both sides. One of the problems with this, of course, is that it stifles some genuine opinions, and so doesn’t represent national feeling accurately: but the vagaries of our voting system make this unlikely in any case. (See below, https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/.) Another drawback is that it only works if the main ideological issues dividing the parties are the ones that also divide opinion more generally. ‘Europe’ isn’t a ‘party’ question in this sense. Where you stand on the question of – say – ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ is no reliable guide to whether you will vote ‘in’ or ‘out’. There are socialist and capitalist arguments on both sides.

Which is why the present Labour Party’s current line – vote ‘Remain’ in order to help create a Europe that socialists can feel more comfortable with – is, to my mind, such a smart one. It acknowledges the undoubted inadequacies and sins of the EU – meaning that voting ‘Remain’ won’t imply that you like it – while at the same time giving some vague hope of your making a difference, whether that can be said to be realistic or not. In fact I think that, with world opinion moving as it is against the neo-liberalism that is at the heart of the Union’s problems, this ‘reformist’ agenda does stand a chance. In which case it could be Labour that will gain – possibly sooner than we think; apparently Tory Brexiteers are calling and Corbyn is preparing for a ‘snap’ election after the referendum – from this latest in the series of party splits that has been such a comparatively rare but still a major feature of British political history over the past 200 years.

Now the IMF – the IMF! – admits that it was wrong all along.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/neoliberalism-is-increasing-inequality-and-stunting-economic-growth-the-imf-says-a7052416.htm.

So, back again to the early 1900s, when it was first ‘discovered’ that neo-liberalism (then, of course, the old liberalism) didn’t work. One of the ‘lessons of history’ that has been forgotten.

If it’s true that the main division in almost every nation’s politics just now, cutting across the traditional left-right one, is between ‘establishments’ on the one hand and those who are disillusioned with conventional parties and politics on the other, as it seems to be, then yesterday’s report from the Commons cross-party Treasury Committee, unanimously lambasting both sides in the current British EU referendum debate for grossly exaggerating and falsifying the figures they are putting out in support of their respective arguments (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/may/27/misleading-eu-referendum-campaigns-treasury-select-committee-report), is not going to do either of the ‘establishment’ camps, ‘Brexit’ or ‘Remain’, any favours. This really has been a very unsavoury campaign so far, bereft of balance, truth and even normal civility, with both sides – but especially George Osborne and Boris Johnson – hurling claims and counter-claims around in an effort to shock the electorate one way or another: every family losing £4,000 a year if we leave (Osborne), the EU costing us £350 million a week (Johnson), both rubbish; but in a fashion that must surely be counter-productive, now that their exaggerations have become better known – and more newsworthy – than their actual arguments.

What effect this will have on the result is hard to say. It may well put people off voting at all, on the ‘plague on both your houses’ principle; and who could blame them? In the long run it is likely to increase people’s distrust of conventional politics in a way that could push them into a number of non-conventional channels: the rising left-wing protest one, anti-austerity and all the rest, represented by Corbyn here and by Sanders in the USA; or the right-wing quasi-Fascist one that Trump and UKIP seem to be inching towards. Any anti-global capitalist voter – which most of them are, au fond – could be pushed in either direction.

Establishment politicians seem entirely oblivious of this. The other day Tony Blair admitted that he was ‘struggling to understand present-day politics’ (https://www.totalpolitics.com/articles/news/tony-blair-gets-candid-corbynism-‘i-used-think-i-was-good-politics’). I’m sure he is. The same applies to most of his old ‘New Labour’ cronies, which is what puts them so much against Jeremy Corbyn, who maybe does understand, from always having been outside the ‘Westminster bubble’ before now. The view from there, looking in, is different.