Porter’s Pensées

Why, considering that Britain and Sweden seemed to be travelling along the same political road up to the 1960s – towards ‘social democracy’ – did they come to diverge so widely thereafter? It can’t just be Thatcher. Or the Unions. Or the Swedes’ basic decency. Or latitude – cold climates more communitarian than warm ones. (Viz. Canada, too.) Or the ‘special relationship’. Or Eton. Or…. Well, there are several other possibilities. I’m going to work on this. It could form my next substantial writing project. I know both countries pretty well.

A couple of old (indeed, dead) imperialists have been in the news recently. The first is Cecil Rhodes, whose statue outside Oriel College Oxford I had never noticed, until the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ protest movement at Oxford University earlier this year – imported originally from Cape Town, whose Rhodes statue is rather more prominent – brought it to all of our attentions. The second is Kipling.

According to its organisers, the rationale behind the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement was to highlight the university’s ‘implication in colonialism and the violence that accompanied it’, and to persuade the authorities to better represent ‘black voices’ in their curriculum. (This is from Wiki.) Both of these are laudable objects, although the first raises the obvious question of ‘where to stop’ – which institutions haven’t been implicated to some extent or other in the darker aspects of colonialism and other evils in the past; and the second presents the difficulty that it might not be the best means of achieving the aim of furthering ‘Black Studies’. Indeed, it could be counter-productive, if it alienates more people than it wins over: anti-‘PC’ backwoods-people, of course; but also those who might regard pulling down statues from a past civilization to be too close for comfort to what the Taliban and Isis do. As a historian, I find the idea of destroying history deeply troubling. I regard most mediaeval culture as pretty abhorrent, but wouldn’t want to raze its cathedrals and castles to the ground for that reason. I have no plans to pull down Thatcher’s statue in the lobby of the House of Commons. Successor generations need to be reminded of everything about the past, good and bad. That’s the only way in which any ‘lessons from history’ will ever be learned.

Rudyard Kipling’s name has come up in connection with the new Disney film of The Jungle Book, due for general release soon. Here’s a pretty typical attack on that: http://io9.gizmodo.com/reminder-rudyard-kipling-was-a-racist-fuck-and-the-jun-1771044121. (Thanks, Robin.) You’ll get the general tenor of it from the title of that link. Actually the article is not quite as strong as this implies, with the author calling not for censorship of the film, but for it to be placed in some kind of – racist and imperialist – ‘context’. How this is to be done is not made clear. A re-edit of the whole thing? A ‘Health Warning’ on cinema tickets and DVD boxes? Subtitles drawing attention to the implicit racism? A compulsory lecture at the beginning from an anti-imperialist (like me)? It’s clearly problematical and, I would have thought, unnecessary.

I’ve not seen the film yet, of course, but racism and imperialism were not essential elements of either the book or the earlier Disney animated version; and I’m pretty certain were not the aspects of them that were picked up by my own children and grandchildren when they read or watched it, or even could have influenced them subliminally. That’s not to say that Kipling was not an imperialist, a racist, and a pretty unpleasant human being all round. You can read my unflattering view of him here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n08/bernard-porter/so-much-to-hate. (Perhaps they could give copies of that out to cinema-goers.) The inconvenient fact remains, however, that unpleasant people can produce wonderful and even beautiful art. Kipling did. So did Wagner and Larkin. The Renaissance composer Gesualdo was a murderer yet still wrote some beautiful madrigals. In all these cases their art – or most of it – can be separated from their lives. Even imperialists can be complicated human beings. Imperialism itself is very complex thing. (That’s the main theme of my British Imperial.)

The second ‘excuse’ that is usually trotted out for monsters like Rhodes and Kipling is that they were ‘creatures of their time’, and so should only be judged by the less enlightened standards of their age. That might have something to be said for it; except that in this case it just won’t wash. I know that the general opinion now is that everyone in late nineteenth century Britain was an imperialist and a racist; but that simply wasn’t so. Again, you’ll need to go to another of my books, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, for evidence of that. With respect to the two men under consideration here, it is a fact that they were loathed in Britain at the time, at least as widely and fiercely as they were loved, and for the very same reasons we disapprove of them today. Proposals to raise statues to Rhodes were controversial then. (It might be significant that the Oriel one is so hidden away.) They were by no means typical, except of a very small minority of Anglo-South African and Anglo-Indian society. Which might be a more logical reason for pulling down their statues and censoring their films; except that – in the last resort – nothing can justify that.

This was a new one to me. A young drink-driver responsible for the deaths of four people in Texas in February has pleaded in his defence that he was suffering from ‘affluenza’ at the time. ‘Affluenza’ apparently refers to the disadvantage of being brought up in a rich family, in circumstances which therefore render you unable to tell right from wrong. Apparently it has been known about for years: (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/04/affluenza-history-disease-wealth-privilege-ethan-couch). One common symptom is that if you do wrong – trash a restaurant, for example – you never apologise, but simply offer the victim money. The Oxford Bullingdon club obviously comes to mind. (See the splendid 2014 film, The Riot Club. No, it’s not fiction. I saw quite a lot of that sort of thing at Cambridge.)

Is there a diagnostic test for ‘affluenza’? If so, I could suggest a few people it might be tried out on. Two of them live next door to each other in Downing Street. Both, coincidentally, were ‘Bullers’ themselves; as was Boris. Someone ought also to tell Sir Alan Duncan (below, April 12), and all those other Tories who believe that being born into affluence, as well as or even more than having achieved it, somehow qualifies a person for power. At the very least, it’s a factor to be taken into account on the other side.

I remember, in the course of one of my spats with the controversial historian Niall Ferguson, his maintaining in an email to me that he regarded most criticisms of his work as motivated by envy of his ‘fame and fortune’. I’ve envied neither – would hate to be in Niall’s shoes – and so felt rather insulted by that. I’ve always deliberately avoided ‘fame’, and never wanted more money than I can comfortably get along with. I’m not even ‘competitive’, so far as my ‘career’ is concerned. Merely a seeker after truth, that’s me. (!)

In Parliament yesterday, in the debate over tax havens arising from the ‘Panama Papers’ disclosures, several Conservative MPs similarly attributed the furore that has arisen over tax avoidance to what they called ‘the politics of envy’, from the other side. That’s a common charge. ‘Labour just hates people who are rich’, claimed Sir Alan Duncan. The only reason for that was that they would like to be rich too. They were jealous. I suspect that people like Duncan genuinely do believe that everyone is like that: out for him or her self. It’s a basic law of human nature. Anyone who denies it – a self-styled ‘truth seeker’, for example – is being hypocritical.

Envy of course is in direct contravention to the Tenth Commandment, ‘thou shalt not covet’. But only insofar as it applies to the plebs. For covetousness at a higher level is supposed to be the very engine of progress in society. It is what drives ‘aspiration’, a word that the Prime Minister repeated at least a dozen times in the course of the debate. It may be this thought that led Moses (or whoever) to slip ‘covetousness’ into the Commandments schedule only right at the end. (It probably just edged out ‘Thou shalt not play golf.’) That aside, becoming rich is the only respectable motive for ‘aspiration’. And being rich is the main indication that you have aspired successfully.

It’s this idea that seems to lie at the root of Alan Duncan’s second extraordinary claim yesterday: that if you somehow discouraged rich people from becoming MPs – by tightening the rules on tax avoidance, for example – you would end up with a parliament ‘stuffed full of low achievers, who hate enterprise, hate people who look after their own family, and know nothing about the outside world.’

The Labour MP Liz Kendall immediately seized on the ‘cretinous’ implication of this: that ‘you can only be a high achiever if you make a packet of money.’ I’ve come across this attitude before, at Cambridge college reunions some years ago, for example, when contemporaries who had gone on to become something big in the City tended to regard me as a ‘low achiever’ for having stayed in low-paid academe. They were very kind about it. (And they’ve become a lot less cocky since the crash of 2008.) So I was already familiar with this way of thinking. But Duncan’s words yesterday were the most public and explicit expression of it I have seen for many years.

It’s also at one, of course, with the pitch Donald Trump is making in America: that his ‘success’ as a businessman is what qualifies him to be President. In my view it’s what especially disqualifies him. But that’s probably just me being envious.

Nobody much notices Canada. (Outside Canada, that is.) Its citizens look much like (US) Americans, and sound like them, if you’re not attuned to the subtle differences of dialect. Canadian cities are similar to US ones; a bit cleaner, perhaps, and Montreal is obviously more French. (The US has New Orleans, but they don’t speak French there) You don’t find ‘Mounties’ in the cities, who would stand out. (Where are they?) On world maps Canada is solidly situated on one of the margins of the globe – if globes can strictly have ‘margins’ – petering out into white nothingness; rather like Scandinavia, which tends to be similarly ignored. (In all my years of studying modern European history at school and college, I don’t remember Sweden and Norway featuring at all.) Many people think of it as lying deep in snow the whole year round, again rather like Scandinavia. A word often applied to it is ‘boring’, which I suppose it is if you mean it doesn’t have exciting things happening there, like school massacres and mad religiosi and Trump. After sitting through the horror movie that the US often appears to be, Canada can seem rather soporific.

In 1812 Canada (or, more strictly then, ‘British North America’) was the target of an attempt by the USA to annex it to her, thus completing the project begun by the ‘American Revolution’, before going on to conquer ‘the West’ and, after that, in the ambitious minds of some Republicans, Central and South America. In many US school history books the ‘War of 1812’ is called the ‘Second War of American Independence’. In actual fact that exactly reverses the roles between the two protagonists. The British weren’t the imperialists, the Americans were. And the Canadians weren’t ‘subjects’ of his Britannic Majesty, in any real sense, but people who were fighting for their own independence, from the USA, under Britain’s protection. (I wrote what I thought was a rather good piece on this for the LRB in 2008: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n04/bernard-porter/friendly-fire. It attracted some flak from patriotic Americans, but I stand by it.) In fact 1812 was one of the first examples of an anti-imperial war against the American behemoth. And it was the only successful one, in these early years. (Mexico and the native Americans fared much worse.) The trend of American imperial failures begins with Canada, and ends up with Iraq.

Thank God the Canadians held out. They seem to be the only beacons of hope and sanity on the north American continent today. A friend wrote me from Montreal recently that Bernie Sanders would be situated around the middle of the political spectrum in Canada, rather than on the far Left, as he’s seen in the USA. It’s this that prompted this post. I must clearly learn more about this wonderful country. (I’ve visited several times, but never really studied it.)

Just before the last War the Pentagon drew up a strategic plan, called ‘War Plan Red’, for the conquest of Canada. Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean much; it’s the job of War Offices to plan for any eventuality, however unlikely. But it’s apparently still there, in the archive. Whatever you do, don’t tell Trump. It might give him ideas.

There. It’s out. Doesn’t that feel better, David? No more suspicion, no more innuendo; we can all see that you’re clean. Still filthy rich, of course, and so unlikely to be able to empathise with the rest of us; but your tax return, revealed today, seems to show that you’ve not been indulging in any illegalities (tax evasion) or what most of us would regard as immoralities (tax avoidance) to make you even richer. Over the past six years, at least. And setting your dodgy Dad aside.

Unless, of course, you’ve hidden something that those envious Corbynite plebs might uncover later, to bring the whole gleaming sepulchre tumbling down. But that’s unlikely – if only because it’s hard to imagine that you, a clever politician, would run such a risk.

No; the main danger to the Conservative government now is that Cameron’s entirely praiseworthy action might be thought to set a precedent for his ministerial colleagues, many of whom may well not be as snowy white as he. This will be difficult and embarrassing for them to try to resist. George Osborne’s tax returns will be next. I’m looking forward to that. After all, he was the one who once gave advice on television to people who wanted to avoid death duty: ‘I probably shouldn’t be saying this’ (below, April 6). And I can’t believe that many of the others haven’t got off-shore accounts. Several Labour, Lib-Dem and SNP MPs too, I suspect. Chicanery isn’t a strictly party matter, although Tories, having more money, and a different moral attitude towards taxation (aka ‘robbery’), are likely to be the chief villains here.

Which is why this move by Cameron, whatever its main motivation, which is likely to be short-term – to get him out of an immediate political fix just before the EU referendum – could prove to have quite revolutionary implications. To repeat (below, April 5): the idea that one’s financial affairs are purely a private matter is a very upper-class British notion, not shared, for example, in Scandinavia. There, as is well known, everyone’s tax returns are open to public scrutiny. It is society, after all, in the form of democratically-elected governments, that sets the conditions within which everyone earns his or her bread; so – the argument goes – the public is entitled to see how and what use they make of what they earn (or inherit). Of course there are ways of circumventing this – again, I’m sure some Swedish names will turn up in the ‘Panama Papers’ – but still, the principle is there. The result in Scandinavia appears to be a more open society than ours; where our secrecy on a number of fronts – the ‘Secret Service’ is another – is bound to give rise to public distrust. And endemic distrust can’t be good for democracy. It is arguable that it has been the bane of British politics and society for years.

So, all credit to Cameron for initiating what could turn out to be a momentous change in British governance. More momentous, I suspect, than he ever imagined. He’s only a clever politician, after all.

 *

Postscript. Why has all the Tory press come out so strongly against Cameron on this? You’d have thought they would have mustered loyally to his side. He had a case, after all, and a pretty conventional Conservative one at that. I’m sure the press proprietors are fiddling their taxes much more than he is, and not seeing any harm in it. Could it just be his stance on the issue of Europe? He and Osborne will be leading the ‘Remain’ camp. Most of the right-wing press sides with Brexit. A few weeks ago they had it in for Osborne, over an issue on which you would think – again – they would have taken his side (cutting welfare). Now they’re hoping to chop down Cameron too. It must all have to do with the referendum. Europe isn’t only making for strange bedfellows; it’s also leading the Conservatives’ usual sleeping partners to throw off their duvets.

PPS. Two days later. They’ve returned to the fold. (http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/apr/12/rightwing-press-rallies-to-david-camerons-side-over-tax-storm).

What does it say about me as a person that almost the only pleasure I get from the News nowadays is reading or hearing about the discomfort of people I loathe? (Famous people, that is. I don’t think I loathe anyone I know personally.) The Conservatives’ misfortunes this week have been a joy to me; almost on a par with Chelsea Football Club’s sudden decline this season. They’ve brought sunshine into my declining years. God, I wish I could be there, in David and Samantha’s drawing room, to see it on their faces! I only hope they don’t let it show to their kids, who are perfectly innocent now, of course, and will be until they inherit their parents’ offshore gains. The sins of the father should only be visited on his children when they get to know about them, yet don’t dissociate themselves from them. As David Cameron hasn’t, so far, in relation to his father Ian. (‘He was a stockbroker, after all.’)

One respectable reason for rejoicing in your enemy’s misfortune could be because you believe it could bring a better situation about. That might make me feel less uneasy about my Schadenfreude. My problem on that front, however, is that I don’t have that positive faith any more, or even much hope. For me, hope died with the Great Reaction of the 1980s-onwards, when our steady progression towards a truly civilised society – the welfare state, decolonisation – was brutally reversed, not necessarily by Thatcher – she was swimming with a global current – but on her watch. With all that has happened since, it’s difficult to have any confidence at all in a better world to come. Cameron will probably survive. If not we’ll have the awful Boris. Chelsea will bounce back. Whatever happens in the American Presidential election, the Republicans will be led by one of two monsters, and the Democrats by the unreliable Hilary. Sanders and Corbyn aren’t thought to stand a chance. (I suspect people might be wrong about Corbyn.) Overt Socialism is too discredited – unfairly, perhaps – to make a comeback. We progressives thought we’d won with Leveson, but look what has become of that. Murdoch’s and Dacre’s bile is still unshackled. With regards to Europe, whichever side wins the referendum we’ll still be saddled with the profoundly anti-democratic TTIP. Further afield, if Assad is toppled it will only be by someone worse, like ISIS, and if ISIS is ever defeated, it will probably be replaced by something almost as bad. (That’s been the history of the Middle East latterly.) On climate change, recent reforms seem to have been too little, too late. You can see why I’m reduced to crusty old despair, relieved only by my pleasure at seeing Cameron’s face getting pinker. Which isn’t very creditable, to me personally. You really shouldn’t get enjoyment from seeing people’s pain.

If there is to be hope, it may come from one or both of two directions. The first is the noisy world-wide reaction against unrestrained free marketism, globalisation and ‘austerity’ which is sweeping Europe and America just now. (Both Sanders and Trump are expressing this, I think, though somewhat blindly on the latter’s part.) If the anti-austerians could get their act and their splintered causes together (can I suggest under the banner of JM Keynes?), they might just become powerful enough to act as a challenge both to the ‘conventional’ political and economic establishments, and to the quasi-Fascist alternative represented by Trump. If they want a rough model of how things might be, they could look to Sweden, where I spend much of my time.

Secondly, there are women. Theirs is the only progressive cause, I think, which has actually gone from strength to strength since Thatcher’s time – though little thanks to her. In Britain their entry into the public sphere over the past twenty or thirty years has been remarkable. Once they’ve firmly established themselves in their rightful place in political society, they can turn their attention away from their own liberation and begin to have an effect in the areas they’ve traditionally been excluded from. (That’s how the British Labour Party evolved in the early 20^th century.) Most of the reactionary tendencies of the last few decades have had a ‘macho’ element to them – Trumpery most obviously. So bring on the women. They may be our only hope. After all, isn’t that – reforming their menfolk – their traditional role? (Sorry.)

‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Or words to that effect. I’ve suddenly remembered that I have sinned too. In 1970 I taught at an American university for a couple of months, and of course received a salary, on which I paid both Federal and State taxes. When I got back to Britain my bank told me I was liable to pay UK tax on that too, which however I could avoid if I transferred that income into one of their Channel Island accounts, set up for this purpose. I agreed, and the money went ‘off-shore’ until the end of that financial year. I remember feeling uneasy at the time, but also thought it was unfair that I should be taxed twice on the same income. Since then a ‘double taxation’ treaty between the UK and USA has meant that I didn’t need to do this for the money I earned much later at Yale. But I suppose that does make me a bit of a hypocrite for railing against Cameron’s, and all the other rich boys’, ‘tax haven’ arrangements today.

The broader point I want to make, however, is that this was common practice at the time. It was my bank (Barclays) that suggested the Channel Island arrangement. Since then both they and the other banks I’ve used – in a largely frustrating search to find a really ‘ethical’ one – have frequently called me in to present me with options for maximising my gains on my (small) savings, some of which – especially the very complicated ones – have certainly involved overseas tax-avoidance wheezes. I’ve never gone in for any of these, and indeed steer clear of anything that involves buying shares on the Stock Exchange, even. My bank advisers genuinely, I think, don’t understand this. (One of them is called ‘McMoney’. I kid you not.) But for them the small fees they would earn on my meagre savings are hardly worth the time and effort of their trying to persuade me, so they let me go. It must be more difficult for richer and less principled people to avoid their lure, especially when, up to now, they haven’t seen anything particularly wrong in it. That’s why I’m morally certain that Dave still has something to hide. Why doesn’t he just admit it and say sorry? As someone who used to be a small-time sinner himself, I’d understand.

*

6 p.m. After five days of prevarication, he’s finally admitted it, in a weaselly kind of way. (http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/07/david-cameron-admits-he-profited-fathers-offshore-fund-panama-papers.) So perhaps we can now get back to the much more important principle involved (below, April 5).

It beggars belief that David Cameron ‘holds no shares’, as he claimed the other day, only his official salary and ‘some savings on which I draw some interest’. Everybody of his class holds shares. If Cameron doesn’t now, it’s either because all his business affairs were put into a ‘blind trust’ when he became PM, to be returned to him when he retires, as I believe is the usual constitutional practice, in which case it’s sheer sophistry to claim that he doesn’t ‘own’ them; or he quickly sold or transferred them as soon as the Panama scandal came up. Which is surely why he is still refusing to state whether he has had any offshore accounts in the past.

‘Savings from which I draw some interest’ gives the impression that he merely puts by some pennies from his monthly salary, which he then takes out of his piggy bank and puts into a Post Office savings account. This is not usually how one would describe one’s inherited and ill-earned millions accumulating a great deal of interest, no doubt, from his banks.

He’ll probably get away with it, if only because the politicians around him have all been doing the same thing (Osborne gave an interview on TV a few years ago giving advice to people on clever schemes to avoid paying tax) and so won’t welsh on him; and nor will the financiers who advise him on these matters. They’d all go down with him. If only.

Here’s George on how to avoid inheritance tax: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qjBec3fpBI). – I particularly like the ‘I probably shouldn’t be saying this’.

David Cameron insists that his tax affairs are ‘a private matter’. That’s when asked whether he is still implicated in the great tax-avoidance scandal that is front-page news today, the ‘Panama Papers’; as we know his grim and arrogant-looking father was. (Meaning, incidentally, that Cameron-fils has almost certainly profited from it, if it helped pay his Eton fees.) This is very much a British upper-class way of looking at things, with their earnings being up there with their sexual orientations and religious beliefs, as matters strictly between them and their Gods. To ask an English gentleman in public what he or she earns is tantamount to asking whether they like doing it doggy-style. At best it’s ‘bad form’; at worst an intrusion.

In fact, of course, how you earn your lucre is of very great public relevance. Money isn’t earned (or inherited) in a vacuum, after all, or by your own unaided efforts, but is facilitated by the opportunities, restrictions and rules that the political society around you provides. What anyone earns is of public relevance, and therefore of legitimate interest, in a democratic society. Dependable knowledge of it would help the democracy set those opportunities, restrictions and rules, to society’s benefit as a whole. That is especially so when private profit can have an impact on the more general good, as is clearly the case when taxes that could be spent on new schools and hospitals are spirited away in ‘tax havens’: especially when responsibility for those tax havens lies with the British Foreign Office ultimately. (I’m referring here of course to the British Virgin Islands. As a historian of the British Empire, I’m looking forward to working out in my mind whether Britain’s abolishing their tax haven status will amount to ‘imperialism’ or not.) Then there’s the obvious question, in the case of politicians, of whether any of these hidden emoluments could affect their opinions on – for example – tax policy generally. Whatever their personal tax statuses may be – and I don’t know any more about Cameron’s and Osborne’s than anyone apart from their Gods – they must be in the backs of ministers’ minds when they decide who is to bear the worst blows of ‘austerity’. So of course we should all be able to see their tax returns, as honest Jeremy has already volunteered, and I believe American Presidential candidates are expected to do.

In Sweden, as I understand it, this is entrenched in law. The principle of ‘freedom of information’ means that anyone is entitled to have sight of anyone else’s tax returns and assessments. Of course there will still be ways of avoiding this scrutiny – I shouldn’t be surprised if some Swedish names turn up in the ‘Panama Papers’; but at least the principle is there. This probably derives from Sweden’s more social and democratic underlying culture than our more individualistic and secretive one. I’ve lived there, on and off, for twenty years, paying Swedish taxes, and not yet noticed any ill effects.

(A shortened version of this appeared in the Guardian, Letters Page, 6 April.)