Porter’s Pensées

En route back to Stockholm. I notice on the Guardian website that the Julian Assange case has popped into the news again, albeit marginally: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/25/swedish-court-upholds-julian-assange-arrest-warrant-wikileaks.

I’ve written on this before, drawing from my expertise in counter-espionage history, and my residence in Sweden. My latest thoughts are to be found earlier on this blog: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/02/07/assange-again/; and in a piece I wrote for the current Lobster: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster71/lob71-assange-again.pdf. I have nothing much to add to this now, especially aboard a rather bumpy train from Hull to Gatwick; but so many people I meet seem to be misinformed about this scandalous affair, that I thought a reminder might be useful.

The Cannes Film Festival’s award of its Palme d’Or to Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake is a significant event politically as well as culturally. Loach is the last of our genuinely radical film directors who is not a ‘Luvvie’, making films on important working-class themes, with largely amateur actors who are encouraged to extemporise. This kind of social realism used to be fairly common in the democratic 1950s and ’60s, producing that wonderful spate of grainy black-and-white pictures about ‘Northern’ Life: A Taste of Honey, This Sporting Life, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and so on; until they were edged out by shinier and more upper class-themed pics, often starring the public school-educated actors who have attracted some controversy recently for their domination of the field. (Though that’s hardly their fault; and many are very good.)

By contrast, even Loach’s most recent films can appear passé today, as though working-class culture were a thing of the past – which it may be becoming, with the destruction of traditional working-class jobs. (But I didn’t notice it in West Ham the other day.) When I come away from them, I still imagine them in black-and-white, even though most of them are in colour. All of them treat deeply serious popular themes as well as being warmly entertaining, deriving their entertainment value from a different and distinctive culture from their rivals . My personal favourites are Cathy Come Home (1966, for TV); Kes (1969); Riff-Raff (1991); Looking for Eric (2009), and the inspiring documentary – for old Labourites like me – The Spirit of ’45 (2013). But there are many more; all of them still sticking to ‘the spirit of 1945’, however hopeless that spirit must appear now.

Loach is still politically very active: anti-austerity, pro-Palestine, pro-trade unions, anti-EU, and so on – the usual (good) causes. In 1977 he turned down an OBE, on the grounds that it represented ‘all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest. I turned down the OBE because it’s not a club you want to join when you look at the villains who’ve got it.’ Touché. (I’d love to be offered an ‘honour’ just so that I could turn it down. No chance of that.)

Of course films don’t ‘matter’ – although Cathy Come Home is supposed to have had an impact on the housing crisis of its time. What Loach’s may do, however, is to indicate that radical left-wing opinion, or at least its spirit, is not quite as antediluvian as it is often presented, if it can still be represented in ‘culture’ as well as in street politics; giving us old Lefties a smidgeon of hope that its embers could be pokered into flame again. If that is so, then Jeremy Corbyn should benefit.

A true hero; and sadly the only one of his kind left.

If we can have a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, why can’t we have one on TTIP? The latter may well pose a far greater threat to our democracy than the former, although exactly how much of a threat can’t be known, because the negotiations over it have been kept so secret. It’s almost as if the TTIPers want to hide it from us until it can be slid under the door and into European law, unnoticed.

It doesn’t sound very dangerous on the surface: a mere ‘trade deal’, rather technical, and far more boring than the great issue of ‘sovereignty’ which the EU referendum is supposed to be all about. But in fact it could affect our ‘sovereignty’ far more drastically than questions of straight bananas, or Brussels bureaucracy, or even immigration, which we at least have some distant and shared influence over. For the principle behind TTIP – however much this may be modified by negotiation – is that commercial considerations should override democratically arrived-at laws, whenever they come into conflict: for example, if controls on certain consumables for health and safety reasons hinder those (American) firms who want to sell us those products un-safely, or a country’s labour laws hinder foreign investment, or a democracy’s preference for a ‘national’ and publicly-owned health system doesn’t allow (American) healthcare businesses to buy up parts of it. People (like me) have been noticing the slow but inexorable advance of free-market capitalism, both in the dominant discourse of society and in practice (especially privatisation, but also in the way universities are run), for thirty or forty years now, not just in Britain, but in the world generally; seeming to confirm either Marx’s or the Neoliberals’ insistence – they both agree on this – that this is a ‘natural’ and inevitable process, until Utopia is reached (the neo-liberals), or the system collapses under the force of its internal contradictions (Marx). TTIP is a very obvious stage in this, giving market considerations primacy over democracy, quite overtly now. In the past it was foreign nations or confederations that threatened the latter. Now it’s this more opaque but also insidious power.

In part it has become powerful because of the unquestioning and almost mystical respect the world seems to pay nowadays to the principles of ‘competition’ and ‘free trade’. The subject of my first book, the economist and journalist JA Hobson, was one of the first to point out, around 1900, how oppressive those things could be, both abroad, in firing exploitative ‘Imperialism’, the title of his most famous work; and at home, in working against the interests of domestic society as a whole. The argument was roughly this: competitive capitalism encouraged manufacturers and other employers to lower costs by reducing wages, which also reduced the domestic demand for the goods they were making, so forcing them to look for cheap markets abroad. Pay the workers more, and none of this would happen; employees would themselves soak up the ‘surplus products’, thus keeping the factories (or whatever) going and the workers in work, and lessening the necessity for them to sell to and exploit foreigners. Hobson even maintained that there was no need for foreign trade at all, except on the margins: in things that a country could not produce or grow itself. Britain’s dependence on foreign trade (and increasingly investment) since the eighteenth century was weakening her, impoverishing her people, destabilising her society, and getting her into dangerous scraps abroad. Of course there’s more to Hobson’s ideas than this – enough for them to furnish the foundation for John Maynard Keynes’s much more famous theory – as Keynes himself generously acknowledged. But it makes you think.

In reality, however, it doesn’t seem to depend on ‘theories’. Keynes’s were tried out, notably in Britain after the last war, with great success, as most leading economists recently have come to acknowledge. But no matter; they were overturned in the 1970s and ’80s by the new breed of economists who had such an influence on Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan, in a way we can only understand, I think, if we acknowledge that the combined power of selfish and powerful interests – a.k.a. historical inevitability – was bound to trounce rational thinking, and also – as a side-effect – democracy, in the end. TTIP is the climax of that process. (So far.)

To return to the EU: it’s one of the drawbacks of the great debate we’re having over that to distract us from this graver threat to democracy – defined, that is, as a people’s ability, collectively, to arrange their affairs as they want. Ours of course is the traditional way to think about international politics: in terms of national independence, sovereignty and the like, when they seem to be threatened by other nations and their sovereignties. Nations are something you can see, on maps for example. Capitalism is less visible, except in its effects, which are not always traceable back to it. So it plays only a bit-part in the current referendum debate.

To my mind it should count much more. My whole present view of the European question, and the way my vote will go, revolve around what it will mean for TTIP. If I thought Brexit could mean that an ‘independent’ UK was likely to opt out of it, I’d vote with Boris and Nigel – holding my nose, of course. But I’m not at all convinced that the majority of the people who lead the Vote Out campaign, or would take the helm of the nation after a withdrawal (especially if Scotland took the opportunity to secede), are sufficiently anti-‘trade’. Most of them are free marketeers. In Europe things are different. Europe is marginally more ‘socialist’ in any case. If we stay, we can team up with like-minded and more popular anti-capitalists there, hopefully to vote TTIP down.

It’s a long shot, I realise; and I’m also aware of the downsides of the EU, from a left-wing point of view, as presently organised. Yes, it has become mainly a capitalists’ club. It’s austerian to a fault. Its treatment of Greece was unforgiveable. The bureaucracy is a problem. ‘Enlargement’ is an even a greater one: smelling to me of ‘imperialism’ – and I know about such things. (Putin is right about Ukraine.) And some of the propaganda on the ‘Remain’ side is enough to put anyone off.

But a radical Europe seems to me just now to hold out a slightly better chance for real independence – independence, that is, from the Global Leviathan – than Britain is likely to achieve on her own. Jeremy Corbyn is presently out there now campaigning on the slogan ‘Another Europe is possible’. Bless him. Let’s hope he’s right. – And be prepared to read here that I’ve changed my mind.

After my post on West Ham’s final game at Upton Park a couple of weeks ago (https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/goodbye-to-boleyn/), I promised to ‘lay off’ football for a while. But having just come across this alternative account of the ‘riot’ before that match, by – it’s true – an SWP member (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Smith_(activist)), I think I need to correct some of the impressions that may have been left by that post. As I made clear there, Ben and I didn’t witness the assault on the Manchester United bus personally, as Martin Smith did, but his account fully accords with my impression of the crowd generally. It is also consistent with my knowledge, as a historian, of the relations between police, as representatives of ‘authority’, and large working-class crowds, however peaceful, over the past 200 years; way back to ‘Peterloo’ at the latest (though there the villains were the ‘yeomanry’), and through to Orgreave. The article is headed ‘West Ham hooligans or police liars?’

West Ham United FC played its final game at the Boleyn on Tuesday night (10 May). It was supposed to be a massive party, a celebration of 112 years and 2,398 games at the ground. But before the first ball was kicked a mini riot took place.

The police and the media blamed West Ham supporters. The next morning I was shocked to see several of my friends echoing the media and the polices version of events. The report below is the piece I wrote on my Facebook the next day.

I haven’t changed it in any way (although I’ve added a few photographs), but I thought I’d put it up here so others can at least see there is an alternative explanation.

I think it was George Orwell who said, “When I see a worker and a policeman fighting, I instinctively know what side I’m on.”

That’s always been my guiding principle. So I was a bit shocked to get a raft of messages calling West Ham fans, “thugs” , “hooligans” and worse. Their crime, the media accused them of attacking the Man U team bus.

I’m the first to admit that some of our supporters are no shrinking violets, but before you condemn them, there is a different view of the events, one which I share, because I was there.

Thousands of supporters gathered from lunchtime outside the Boleyn Pub on the corner of the Barking Rd and Green Street. The mood was good natured and just like a party. But as many of us know the police hate large ‘unofficial’ gatherings of working class people.

Without warning mounted police charged into the crowd, no warning but violent intent to clear the crowd. Behind them two police riot vans forced their way through the crowd followed by the Man U coach.

We now know that the Man U coach was late, so instead of finding a new route or slowly clearing the road, the police just bludgeon led their way through the crowd.

Some people did throw stuff at the Man U coach and the police – more in anger and frustration with how they were treated.

But worse was to come. They drove their riot vans and Man U coach up Green Street into thousands of people walking to the ground. On match days the road and the pavements are full of people. The police then stopped their vans and tried to get the coach into the car park. Because they are thick, or because they don’t know the ground, they didn’t realise the coach has to reverse into the car park. It got stuck.

Meanwhile thousands of fans were getting crushed. We were caught between the police vans and lines of police blocking the road at one end and thousands of people making their way down the road from the other way.

We had to carry a young lad to safety, who was suffering from a panic attack. Some people were crying and a guy in a wheelchair was surrounded by friends in a circle trying to protect him.

Hillsborough was at the front of everyone’s minds and it was shouted at the police as they pushed the crowd.

The police have spent the last 24 hours trying to blame West Ham fans for their mess and a mess that could have had disastrous consequences.

So what was a brilliant evening, has been marred by police incompetence and prejudice, call it what you like. They will post a few mug shots of young and not so young fans in the media, drag a few more through the courts and call them ‘scum’. Stupid yes, but they were not to blame for yesterday.

I’ve quoted this in full, but it’s still worth referring to the original: http://www.dreamdeferred.org.uk/2016/05/west-ham-hooligans-or-police-liars/, for the pictures of the crowd and of police posted there, and for the corroborative comments btl.

I’ve been looking back at the 1975 referendum on British membership of what was then called the ‘Common Market’. (This is for those who weren’t around then.) The circumstances of its being held at all are interesting. The main motive behind it was domestic politics: to staunch the wound that adhesion to the Common Market had opened up in Harold Wilson’s Labour Party – Britain had joined at the beginning of 1973 – in particular in view of the pledge that Edward Heath, the Conservative Prime Minister who had negotiated the treaty, had made at the time, that Britain would only join ‘with the full-hearted consent of Parliament and people’. That had been taken to imply – quite reasonably – that the ‘people’ would be given a chance to vote on it quite separately from the House of Commons.

So, in order to fulfil that pledge, albeit tardily, the referendum was held in June, after a pretence at ‘renegotiation’ by Wilson. The pro-Europe camp won it by roughly two to one. This laid the matter to rest, for a while at least. Thereafter Euroscepticism continued to rumble, but only beneath the surface, and on the far Left and far Right of the political spectrum, each of course for entirely different reasons: the Left because the Common Market seemed too ‘market’-driven; the Right because it meant betraying their beloved Empire, and probably also because they disliked foreigners.

There are similarities there with the present situation; but it may be worthwhile also listing some of the contrasts. The first, of course, is that the ‘Common Market’ then was a very different creature from today’s EU: much smaller, and with lesser powers, mainly confined to trade. That makes a vast difference. Just think of – or look back on – a European Community without Poland. And of course in 1975 the Common Market had not yet made the dreadful cock-ups that came with the Euro in particular (poor Greece!), and with the unexpected scale of internal migration that followed its enlargement. It had very little ‘history’ to judge it on.

A second difference is that most of the Euroscepticism expressed then came from the political Left. (Tony Benn was a leading spokesperson.) That situation is more or less reversed today.

A third is that in 1975 there still lingered some of the idealistic feeling that had fuelled the European movement from its beginnings at the end of the Second World War, and which can be seen in many pro-Common Market speeches at the time. How much of this real optimism  survives on the ‘Remain’ side today? Maybe amongst a few young people. But ‘Remain’s’ most powerful arguments centre around the dangers – mainly economic, but also relating to ‘security’ – that ‘Brexit’ is supposed to threaten us with: the ‘politics of fear’. There’s very little positive there, no promise of anything getting better, only of its not getting worse. But then, we are living in more pessimistic times.

In 1975 the Common Market could also be presented as a ‘progressive’ cause: firstly because it seemed to be an expression of ‘internationalism’ – and who on the Left could object to that? – and secondly because the alternative to it, and a main source of resistance to it, was presented as loyalty to an ‘Empire-Commonwealth’ which was widely regarded as out-dated, and which the large anti-imperialist minority in Britain had come to see as a historical mistake. The situation was complicated by Heath’s  obvious non-imperialism; but still Conservative Eurosceptics were  commonly painted as old Blimpish ex-colonial fuddy-duddies, still smarting over the loss of Britain’s Great Power status, and therefore definitely not to be snuggled up to by radical moderns. (In fact this may have been unfair even to the old ‘imperialists’: see below: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/britain-and-europe-a-historical-note/.) Some of those reactionaries still survive on the ‘Brexit’ side – Nigel, obviously – with very likely the same counter-productive effect on their cause. Many Brexiters acknowledge this, which is why Farage hasn’t been allowed to represent the anti-EU side officially.

Which brings us to our last difference. In 1975 there were alternative groupings of nations – alternative that is to the Continental European one – that Britain could have joined. Everyone then accepted (rightly or wrongly) that in an age of ‘superpowers’, only large confederations could hope to compete or even exist beside them. This had been one of the strongest arguments in favour of the old British Empire, too. So ‘Go It Alone’, as it was called then (or ‘GITA’), was not an option. The most suitable remaining choices for Britain were, firstly, the old Commonwealth, shorn of its ‘imperialist’ baggage – which would be difficult, but that’s the way the self-governing dominions wanted her to go: Australia felt ‘betrayed’ by her adhesion to Europe; and secondly, the European Free Trade Association, or ‘EFTA’: a kind of salon des refusés made up of the marginal states of Europe, which were believed to be important enough (they included Scandinavia) to compete with the Common Market, without the latter’s irksome bureaucracy. We don’t have that option today; unless EFTA could somehow be resurrected. (After ‘Swexit’, for example: see below, https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/brexit-swexit/. Norway’s already there.) Which leaves us, in 2016, only with GITA, which was thought to be out of the question in 1975.

It’s undoubtedly a big decision we have to take on June 23 – forty-one years almost to the day since that first referendum – but it is not an easy one, or one that can be made enthusiastically. If you are passionately either pro or anti, you probably haven’t thought sufficiently about it. A while ago I commended Jeremy Corbyn for his lack of zeal on this issue, which struck me as reasonable. (Below, https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/04/19/jeremy-and-europe/.) Personally, I still intend voting ‘Remain’, but it will stick in my craw, especially if TTIP is still on the menu. And I could change my mind.

In fact, five minutes ago a public opinion pollster phoned me to ask which way I was voting. (This has never happened to me before!) I told her I was an ‘undecided’ – almost for the first time in my life. I’m usually more decisive. Well, we’ll see.

I now think my last post may have been a little too rosy. I hadn’t appreciated quite how far the reaction against democracy, in America in particular, and quite explicitly, had gone. Here’s a quote from Jonathan Freedland’s superb long essay in the Guardian this morning. It had me spluttering over my Cheerios.

The World Values Survey of 2011 included a stunning figure. It found that 34% of Americans approved of “having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections”, the figure rising to 42% among those with no education beyond high school. It’s worth reading that again, to let it sink in. It means that one in three US voters would prefer a dictator to democracy. Those Americans are not repudiating this or that government, but abandoning the very idea of democracy itself.

That, note, was five years ago – pre-Trump. And there’s more. Here’s a link to the article: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/19/welcome-to-the-age-of-trump. It’s well worth reading in full.

Of course (to my mind) this is really a reaction against unrestrained capitalism, and the fact that the existing structures of democracy have failed, or perhaps been unable, to keep the beast in check. The danger, of course, is that it attracts voters who aren’t fully aware of this, and put the blame on liberal democracy itself. That’s what I believe happened in Europe in the 1930s. It’s currently closer to fruition than I used to think, in the America characterised – if not yet fully represented – by Trumpery; and can be seen in other forms, more suited to local regional identities, in Britain and across Continental Europe and Russia.

In Britain it takes the comic forms I emphasised last time. This has always been the secret weapon of the British Establishment: its blessed ‘eccentricity’. (Vide Monty Python, et al.) But don’t be fooled. That’s how the upper classes have always managed to survive: by persuading people in revolutionary times that they’re just too silly to be worth guillotining. They then lie low for a generation or two, change their feudal spots for capitalist ones, and pop up later. If we do get a Fascist dictator in the future he (or she) will be a scion of the old Public school-educated aristocracy. As, of course, our 1930s failed Fascist Führer, Sir Oswald Mosley, Bart – Winchester and Sandhurst – was.

Frankly I can’t see any of the present crop of leading politicians filling that slot – not even Johnson or Osborne or May. But one could emerge from the dark depths of the Tory or Ukip (or even Labour) backbenches; if Labour doesn’t sort itself out soon, and present a convincing  and properly democratic solution to our present woes.

What can it mean, all these comedians suddenly rising to prominence in so many of the world’s ‘democracies’? I call them ‘comedians’, but some of them are downright sinister. Berlusconi probably was. Trump certainly is. It’s more difficult to see the barbs beneath Boris Johnson’s cuddly teddy-bear persona, but easy to spot the ambition, cynicism and Thatcherism that lie quite close to the surface. Farage is the only one who looks just too silly to be positively dangerous, but that may be because his bonhomie is a more effective disguise. (Even I wouldn’t mind sharing a pint with the old 1950s throwback. We could talk about the golden age of cricket.) They have one thing in common: an astonishing ability to gain the enthusiastic support of voters whom they can’t be said to ‘represent’ in any real sense, and whose true interests their right-wing policies are in fact fundamentally inimical to. They have this amazing ability to persuade turkeys to vote for Christmas. And Americans to vote for the end of the world, if we don’t look out.

Maybe it’s the influence of the TV stand-up comics and ‘reality’ shows. And the decline of newspapers. And the diminution of politics to the status of a mere ‘game’, with the consequent morphing of politicians into ‘players’ and ‘celebrities’. Conventional politics are not much fun, compared with ‘Big Brother’. ‘Britain’s got Talent’, and ‘Have I Got News for You’. Or even Jeremy Kyle. (Is that where the toffs get their idea of the proles from?) Politicians only become figures of ‘human interest’ when they do something naughty. Boris of course has been a very naughty boy. Oh what a scamp! Nigel’s silliness is always worth tuning in to. It’s the entertainment that counts.

This is to be contrasted with the diminishing respect paid in recent years to more serious politics, for many reasons: the decline of ‘respect’ more generally; the tabloid press’s years of denigrating politicians as self-serving (and probably corrupt) careerists; the dishonourable part played in this by some MPs themselves – votes for cash, money for honours, expenses fiddling, and so on; the fact that most politicians, of all parties, don’t really represent anyone but themselves – have never, that is, done proper jobs, but are plucked straight from student politics or party HQs; the ‘bubble’ that surrounds them, together with most of the commentariat, around Westminster; the grossly unrepresentative nature of both Houses of Parliament – just 30% of the votes, or 25% of the electorate, enabling an extreme Conservative government to do more or less what it likes; all this, and widespread electoral gerrymandering, deterring something like 35% from voting at all, on the grounds that the result is unlikely truly to reflect their wishes – so ‘what’s the point’? (Or they just haven’t received their voting cards.) Added to all this is the dim realisation, in Europe at any rate, that Parliaments – supposedly a country’s ultimate authority – have little power in any case, by the side of (a) those bureaucrats in Brussels, or (b) the global capitalist Leviathan. It’s all pointless. So why not have some fun?

Or, alternatively, use your vote to protest against all this. That is surely what many of the Trumpeters and Farageists are doing. It’s hard to believe that they really do identify with a property billionaire and an ex-stockbroker; or share their more extraordinary, racist, sexist and frankly foolish policies. Except perhaps for one. Trump’s hostility to ‘free trade’, at least as understood by Obama and Clinton, is clearly a powerful attraction. It’s shared, in one form or another, by most of the emerging popular political movements in Europe and America, including those led by Bernie Sanders, whose mass meetings are at least as large and enthusiastic as Trump’s, and by the anti-austerity Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Trump voters tell TV interviewers that if Trump were out of the running, but Sanders still in it, they’d vote for the latter, in preference to Clinton or any other Republican for precisely this reason. That indicates a pretty widespread opposition to ‘globalisation’, which doesn’t look like being reflected in either country’s next election results.

This really is a ‘crisis of capitalism’, or at least of capitalist ideology, which the Democratic Party in America and Labour in Britain could exploit, and I think probably successfully, if only they were structured to do so. The Labour Party has made the shift by electing Corbyn as leader. It just needs its embittered Blairite dissidents to fall into line. The Democratic Party is probably saddled with the neo-liberal Clinton. That will leave a majority of American voters unrepresented on this issue, unless Trump beats her, which – on the strength of his policies on other issues, as well as his personality – hardly bears thinking about.

In Britain a Corbyn electoral victory might bring people back to serious politics, and lessen the appeal of the comedians. But there’s a hard road ahead. The press is pretty much against him, as well as Laura Kuenssberg on BBC1. (See below, May 12.) So he’ll probably fail. In which case the media can get back to politics as an entertaining game. And the ‘people’ will continue unrepresented, alienated and apathetic, and probably poorer, until an even more charismatic but less comical ‘Leader’ than Nigel or Boris steps in, to mop up all this disillusionment – which by now will have turned to anger and hatred – to the benefit of the even further Right.

Corruption has its roots in greed, of course, but is enabled by lack of discipline. In many cases that discipline is self-imposed. People who have the opportunity to be corrupt nonetheless aren’t, because of an inner moral decency, or because of social pressures on them, or simply because they simply can’t see the point of it. ‘I really cannot understand greed’, said Henning Mankell in a filmed interview a couple of years ago. (I think it’s on one of the ‘extra features’ on the DVD set of the Kenneth Branagh version of his Wallander stories.) He looked as though he meant it.

I have to say, though it may make me seem like a self-righteous prick, that I share Mankell’s puzzlement. I can’t see the point of wanting more and more ‘stuff’, either. This doesn’t indicate any moral superiority on the part of people like me and Mankell, only a happy lack of that particular human drive. I suppose it’s a bit like being asexual. Eunuchs should be grateful. Normal human urges can get you into trouble. And they don’t know what they’re missing – like me vis-à-vis greed. I believe – and certainly hope – that there are many others like us. Otherwise corruption would be even rifer than it is.

The problem is, however, that there is clearly also a pretty large number of people who genuinely cannot understand non-greed; really can’t credit that everybody else is not, underneath it all, just as avaricious as they are, but – perhaps – not able to satisfy their avarice due to some defects in themselves. These of course are the ‘low achievers’ upon whom Sir Alan Duncan poured such scorn in that Commons debate a few weeks ago (see below, April 12), suffering from what he called the ‘politics of envy’, which was what explained the Labour Party’s objections to tax havens and the like. They would be greedy if they could. Greed is a natural, human, even universal trait. It’s also – zealous free marketists would claim – a virtue, seen in the context of the competitive capitalist system it is supposed to fuel. (See Gordon Gecko’s great ‘Greed is good’ speech in the film Wall Street.) People like Mankell who claim not to be greedy are either self-deluded, or else hypocrites, and in any case are a brake on ‘progress’. (How much better the Wallander books might have been if Mankell had been motivated by avarice.)

It’s obviously greed of this kind that lies behind most of the corruption that world leaders are supposed to be discussing in London just now; which might be encouraging if many of those leaders were not among the greediest of the lot. Cameron was right when he unguardedly accused Nigeria and Afghanistan recently of being ‘fantastically corrupt’, in what was supposed to be a private conversation with the Queen, although in his case the ‘mote and beam’ image must inevitably come to mind.

Not that Britain harbours quite as much corruption as those two countries, I’m sure. But it’s pretty rife here too; and, I would say, nearly ubiquitous if one includes more than bribery and tax evasion in the definition. (Though there’s plenty of that here too.) I’m thinking of corruptions of the truth, in the current political debate over Europe, and in – for example – much of the advertising industry; the corruption of the public press by rich newspaper owners; ‘jobs for the boys’, and unpaid ‘internships’ for rich boys and girls, in high-status occupations; police collusion to protect themselves; all those muddy goings-on in the banks; secret service conspiracies; ‘cover-ups’ of – for example – paedophilia and other sexual illegalities in high places; paying for huge advantages in education (the Public Schools) and health treatment (BUPA); privatisation for personal profit of essential and sensitive public utilities like prisons and children’s homes; ‘diving’ in football; gambling frauds in cricket and drug-taking in other sports; the parliamentary expenses scandal; election fraud, and the systemic corruption that is involved in both our and the Americans’ political systems (below, February 29); fiddling ‘Teaching Quality Assessment’ returns in order to get more money for your university department – a minor example, perhaps, but one I’m personally acquainted with; and many more. I think it’s got worse since Thatcher, and the birth of the ‘me’ generation, with competitive capitalism being one of the most fertile soils – though not the only one – for chicanery to grow in. All this, in my book, counts as ‘corruption’. And there’s an awful lot of it in Britain just now.

Of course it has always gone on. There were notable corruption scandals throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – I won’t bore you with details just now. Always there have been people – many of them – whose highest ethical bound was what they could get away with, rather than what was right; and who have regarded that as normal and natural. Men and women who don’t act by this simple rule are foolish, naive, ‘low achievers’, or possibly – and you have to look out for this – using their boasted ‘morality’ as a cynical tool for gaining an advantage in some other cunning way. Which is why you need tough rules, imposed from the outside (but sanctioned by the democracy), to tackle corruption.

In the nineteenth century the British managed it, in the sphere of public life, through inculcating the principle of non-greed in their Public Schools; though it pains me, as a strong opponent of the present Public School system, to have to admit this. Public servants, in Whitehall, local government and in the colonies, were taught that their main function was to serve society, and certainly not to profit financially from their positions. It was sometimes called ‘noblesse oblige’. Colonial officers were forbidden to have any pecuniary interest in the colonies they ruled. Civil servants were supposed to give advice and carry out their instructions without prejudice. Retired politicians were expected not to profit from the offices they had held while in power. (In nineteenth century terms, Tony Blair is almost the personification of corruption.) They might be rewarded with ‘gongs’ – knighthoods and the like – but no more. All this was drummed into them in their schools, with the Latin and Greek classics used to illustrate the benefits of pure and the evils of corrupt rule.

And, quite frankly – though it pains me to say this too – Britain’s imperial subjects, in those colonies that were ruled directly by her (they weren’t all), benefitted from it. Any corruption there is in countries like Nigeria and Kenya and India today can’t be said to have been inherited from their colonial rulers, but is more likely to be the result of indigenous ‘greed’, and the withdrawal of the ‘discipline’ that British imperialism provided. Which is why you need some kind of external sanction, though preferably not colonial, to rein in corruption. That’s even when such a sanction might seem to be stifling the capitalist ‘freedom’ to act in your own interests, which may be an engine of progress; but can also be destructive of that progress, through corruption, in the longer term.

So, good luck with that to chairman Cameron and his assortment of dodgy ‘world leaders’. (Personally I don’t hold out much hope.)

It’s not taken long for ‘Godwin’s Law’, or ‘playing the Hitler card’, to come into operation. The ‘law’ itself refers mainly to blogs, and runs: ‘As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1’. It’s then time, according to conventional wisdom, to bring the discussion to an end. Unfortunately, Boris has played the Hitler card right at the beginning. Of course their ‘methods are different’, he admitted in an interview in the Telegraph yesterday. But essentially the Europhiles’ aim, to create a European super-state, is the same as Hitler’s.

After the stew that Ken Livingstone got himself and the Labour Party into with a different Hitler analogy just a few weeks ago, you’d have thought that Boris might have trodden more carefully here. But Boris sees himself as a historian (mainly of classical Greece, but he has also penned a biography of Churchill), so maybe he feels himself more qualified.

Of course Hitler wanted to create a European super-state. So did the Roman emperors, Charlemagne, the ‘Holy’ Roman emperors, Napoleon (whom Boris also mentions), and various rather less famous groups of idealistic pacifists. All these people failed, which was perhaps the only point Johnson was trying to make. If so, he’s of course right, historically. But the ‘H’-word is a problem. (That applies to Ken Livingstone’s recourse to it too.) The question is, what can be inferred from Hitler’s place in this list? It was surely the Nazis’ ‘methods’ and ideology that made their designs obnoxious. Or is Boris saying that it was simply their dreams of unity that were objectionable? Or that other paths towards unity are bound to become Fascist eventually? If neither, why bring his name into the debate at all? It was dicing with political death.

History can be misleading and dangerous. I’m not saying that it can’t teach us anything: as a professional historian that would be unlikely, coming from me. Many of us have already made comparisons between the 1930s and today in connexion with Donald Trump. That analogy is closer, I think. But the past needs to be handled with sensitivity, nuance, a knowledge of context (‘context is all’, as I once wrote), and an awareness that contexts change, over time. Simply holding up simple and sensational apparent historical parallels to buttress simplistic present-day political points is to abuse history. And to make us real historians despair.

All of which is not meant to be an argument in favour of Britain’s membership of the EU, only one against a bad argument against. There are so many of those around just now, on the pro-European side too, as to make me begin to doubt my own intention (at the moment) to vote ‘Remain’. But just as one should be careful not to be won over by bad arguments, so one should also not be swayed the other way by them. Otherwise my inclination would be not to vote at all.

By the way, Hitler was also a vegetarian, and loved dogs.

After Boleyn, I thought it worth recycling this piece, from the LRB Blog, December 2014. I promise to lay off football after this.

When I began following West Ham sixty years ago nearly all the team was made up of local lads, including the World Cup-winning trio of Moore, Hurst and Peters; plus Harry Redknapp – a bit of a joke on the wing. (How we loved him! I still do.) Of course there were players bought in, one or two of them even from abroad – some of these really identified with the place, and were taken into the hearts of the fans; but the core was made up of East Enders and Essex boys. One of them (Andy Malcolm) went to my Dad’s school. We supported them because they were us.

For many years now, like many other people, I’ve been growing increasingly unhappy at the takeover of the ‘people’s game’ by global capitalism. There are groups of supporters all over the country, like FC United of Manchester, trying to pull their teams away from the behemoth. It does no good. It’s money that talks.

It turns out, however, that the phenomenon, and anxiety about it, are nothing new. I recently read Brian Belton’s Founded on Iron (2003, reissued in 2010 by the History Press), an account of West Ham’s origins. The club emerged from a works team, Thames Ironworks, hence the ‘Irons’ nickname, and the crossed hammers on the club crest: nothing to do with the name of the place. The president of the club, Arnold Hills, said in 1899:

In the development of our clubs, I find a tendency at work which seems to be exceedingly dangerous. The committees of several of our clubs, eager for immediate success, are inclined to reinforce their ranks with mercenaries. In our bands and in our football clubs, I find an increasing number of professionals who do not belong to our community but are paid to represent us in their several capacities.

Like the ancient Romans, in their period of decadence, we seem to be willing to be artists and sportsmen by proxy; we hire a team of gladiators and bid them fight our football battles… Now this is a very simple and effective method of producing popular triumphs. It is only a matter of how much we are willing to pay and the weight of our purses can be made the measure of our glory. I have, however, not the smallest intention of entering upon a competition of this kind: I desire that our clubs should be spontaneous and cultivated expressions of our own internal activity; we ought to produce artists and athletes as abundantly and certainly as a carefully tended fruit tree produces fruit.

To be fair, Hills scarcely lived up to this himself. The same year, he financed the transfer of Syd King to bolster Thames Ironworks’ porous defence. King came all the way from Kent. And as any East Ender knows, sahf of the river is almost as foreign as you can get.

The trend may be as old as professional football, but it has recently increased ad absurdum, so that very few successful clubs can claim their success has anything to do with the character or qualities of the localities whose names they take. It’s all down to the international capitalists who own them, or dominate them with lucrative TV contracts. (The rot really set it, as with so many rots, with Rupert Murdoch.) Most Premier League players now are highly talented and obscenely paid foreigners. That being so, how can anyone ‘support’ the teams? Follow them, perhaps; enjoy the entertainment they provide; but support, in the sense of identify with? You might just as well call yourself a ‘supporter’ of Tesco, or J.P. Morgan, or – an apter comparator, perhaps – Billy Smart’s Circus. Or am I reading too much into the notion of ‘support’?

The trouble is that objections to too many foreigners coming into British football can sound like racism, or at the very least Ukippery. That makes me uneasy. I accept that with the triumph of capitalism in just about every area of life (Marx was so right), there’s nothing much we can do about this. Murdoch is on the side of history. But does that make it OK? Is it so very bad, or necessarily chauvinist, to want your favourite team to have genuine social links with its neighbourhood, and so with you? Rather than being just ‘mercenaries’? Or to wonder whether there might be something in Arnold Hills’s striking parallel with ‘the ancient Romans, in their period of decadence’? Or is it just a sign of my grumpy old age?