Porter’s Pensées

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?

In my May 6 blog I mentioned an ‘awful woman’ presenting the recent local election results on BBC1 TV, whose commentary was so fixated with Jeremy Corbyn and what the results meant for him, in a continually negative way, as to entirely skew the whole event, and to lose all sense of balance and objectivity. She made me angry listening to her. Since then I have learned who she is: Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor; and that her presentation of the election results has provoked a petition signed by 35,000 people (but not me: I wouldn’t) to get her sacked. So I wasn’t alone in my disapproval.

Unfortunately some of the complaints against her were couched in abusive sexist terms, the effect of which has been to smear all her critics with the stain of misogyny, and – as I understand – to detract from the force of the complaints themselves. The petition has even been ‘taken down’, so it won’t now go through. (See  the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/12/bbc-bias-labour-sir-michael-lyons.) Liberals and progressives, including Corbyn himself (that good man!), are all up in arms defending her against the ‘trolls’. So the point of her anti-Corbyn bias is lost, and she will no doubt be allowed to continue presenting politics for the BBC in the way she does.

‘God’ knows – as do my feminist partner and close friends – that I’m no sexist. But I do get irritated when prominent people are protected from reasonable criticism by the fact of their sex, or race, or religion, and the assumption that it’s an underlying prejudice against these characteristics of theirs that lies behind the criticisms. It’s similar to the way that critics of Israeli government policy are often vilified.

As it turned out, it wasn’t the Man United supporters I should have worried about. It was ours who spoiled the day – attacking the Man U bus with bottles as it drove into the ground, with the Club’s co-chairman – the ex-pornographer and jail bird David Sullivan, brought up as it happens in the same east London suburb as I was – blaming the visitors for being late. (He’s since retracted.) My son Ben and I didn’t see any of this, and only learned of it as we were leaving, through a cordon of riot-geared policemen and -women. (I hope no-one takes seriously the pic of me that Ben’s posted on one website, over the legend: ‘Police have released this picture of the man they believe to be the ringleader of the violence…’) Up until then it had been a wonderful occasion, and – almost incidentally – a terrific match: 1-0, 1-1, 1-2, 2-2, then 3-2 to the Irons. Joy was unconfined. Until we got out. As so often, it is the hooliganism that has made the headlines.

I suppose that in a way this might be considered an apt send-off for the old ground, true to its history. West Ham has always been known as an – even the – ‘academy’ of skilful and clean football; the legacy of the late, great and good Ron Greenwood, in the era when those dour cheating thugs of Leeds United were winning everything. (See the 2009 film The Damned United.) But its immediate environs, the poorest part of the East End, has always thrown up villains – ‘Jack the Ripper’, the Krays – some of whose criminality seems to have rubbed off on a number of the Hammers’ supporters. These are highly organised, notably in a group who style themselves the ‘Inter-City firm’, whose passionate rivalry with the equally violent and racist ‘Millwall Bushwhackers’ – slogan: ’Everyone hates us and we don’t care’ – can be bloody. (Luckily West Ham and Millwall are in different divisions just now.) It should go without saying that the degree of hooliganism among supporters bears little if any relationship to the playing style and conduct of the teams they follow. It just so happens that the Hammers are burdened by playing in this deprived, violent neighbourhood. Which is a good reason, I suppose, for them to leave. (Last night’s match was their last at Upton Park before they move to the Olympic Stadium in Stratford. ‘East’, not on Avon.) Another is that the Stratford site is far more approachable by buses. One of the sparks last night was the difficulty the Man United coach had threading its way along narrow Green Street, through crowds of supporters, to the ground. Yes, it would have helped if they’d planned to arrive earlier. Ben and I got there in good time. And I came all the way from Hull.

The point is that the Boleyn Ground is cramped: not only its environs, but the ground itself. Its capacity is only about 35,000, which is small for a top club these days. That has huge attractions for those who can get in, of course: from the front rows you can touch the players, and the atmosphere is intense. The walk from Upton Park Underground station to the ground passes between small terrace houses, many of them turned into chippies and ‘pie and eel’ cafes, which make walking along it an olfactory as well as a visual and aural delight. It’s a journey into the past, and into my own past: the old, friendly, communitarian, humorous – as well as villainous – East End. I shall miss it terribly. (I’ve supported West Ham for 60 years.) As I left the ground, a tear passed down my cheek. I wiped it away quickly. In the East End grown men don’t cry.

It’s not only the cramped approach to the Boleyn Ground that has sealed its fate. It’s the commercialisation of football generally. Originally a working-class game, well suited to the sort of venue the Boleyn Ground occupies now, it has – like most other great cultural productions, most of them emanating from ‘below’ – been bought up by the capitalists, who can never ‘create’ anything themselves, in order to exploit it. In parallel with this, there is the ‘gentrification’ of the East End of London, pushing up the monetary value of West Ham’s present real estate, which is very unlikely to be utilised in a way that will benefit the typical East Ender: with genuinely ‘affordable’ housing, for example. (Barney Ronay’s take on this today in the Guardian is good, I think: https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/may/10/goodbye-bash-upton-park-west-ham-united-manchester-united.)

And so the capitalist leviathan rolls on, The Boleyn Ground is its latest victim. It may be worth the move to Stratford if it prevents scenes in the streets like last night’s. But then the warmth and comradeship and humour and the smell of frying onions won’t be there. We’ll all be too far from the play, with a wall of capital between us and it.

(An edited version of this is posted on the LRB Blog, 11 April. It attracted quite a few comments btl. – http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/05/11/bernard-porter/goodbye-to-boleyn/)

Just off to see West Ham’s final game at the Boleyn Ground. Ben got us tickets, miraculously. (They’re like gold. I’ve already been offered £1000 for mine.) The best birthday present I’ve ever had. My mind goes back to all those times I got cross with him as a boy for one reason or another. Oh the guilt…

It will be an emotional occasion. I’ve been going to matches there for sixty years – more than half its history. All of us Hammers love the old ground. Slap in the middle of the East End of London, that wonderful walk up Green Street from the Tube Station, the smell of meat pies, eels and chips all along, the police horses (just in case), claret and blue bunting, ‘I’m for ever blowing bubbles’ being belted out from a thousand beery throats…. And then into the ground, very cosy, spectators pressing right up to the pitch, clouds of soap bubbles floating over, terrific atmosphere, ghostly memories of Moore, Hurst and Peters (who, as you’ll be aware, won the 1966 world cup on their own), lots of humour… (I liked it when they played Spurs recently. Spurs are associated with the Jewish population of Tottenham. The police warned the West Ham fans not to shout anti-semitic slogans. When the game started the Spurs fans started shouting ‘Come on you Yids!’, to which the Hammers fans responded, pointing over to them: ‘Racists! Racists! Terrific.) – Of course it won’t be the same at the bloody Olympic Stadium!

I can’t write more. My eyes are filling with tears. And as one has just been operated on – which is why I’ve not posted anything recently – it’s hard to for me see and write. I have a black patch over that eye, which I’m hoping will frighten the Manchester United hooligans off. When I get back to blogging, it may be about the social and economic significance of the move from Upton Park to Stratford East, and what that says about modern-day capitalism. (Which is quite a lot, actually.)

In the meantime, COYI ! (Come On You Irons!)

The election of Sadiq Khan to be mayor of London is really quite a significant event. Does any other comparable city in Europe or America have a Muslim mayor? Its symbolic importance, at least, is comparable to that of Obama’s Presidency of the USA. In a way it’s more surprising than that, bearing in mind that anti-black prejudice in the US had been declining for some years, whereas Islamophobia in Britain is now at its peak. Shameful efforts by his Conservative rival Zac Goldsmith, probably under the influence of the evil Australian spin-doctor Lynton Crosby, to paint Khan as a ‘friend’ of terrorists, spectacularly backfired; which is hugely promising and a great credit to Londoners. Their city has been attacked and its people slaughtered more than once by self-styled Islamists; yet they can still distinguish between the latter and the great body of Muslims who have integrated into British society peacefully. Contrast Donald Trump, who wants to get rid of all American Muslims. It shows that we in Britain are not that far on the road to Fascism yet.

It also conforms with one of Britain’s most bruited ‘national traditions’ – though it’s one often more honoured in the breach – of tolerance towards outsiders; whatever those who assume that, because Britain had an empire, she must have been racist, may have been told. I’ve argued elsewhere – in my books on imperialism and refugees – that this was not so. Of course negative hypotheses like this are hard to prove; but the present condition of multicultural cities like the now famous Leicester could be taken as evidence; together with Britain’s much greater ‘toleration’ – the word used in the nineteenth century, though it’s a problematical one (why not ‘acceptance’?) – of Jews throughout history, compared with the Continent. As far back as 1868 Britain even elected a (converted) Jew as prime minister. And there have been dozens of Jewish government ministers since. Last year the Tories even appointed a Muslim, Sajid Javid, as Secretary of State for Business: although to tell the truth he’s a little too integrated for my taste. (He’s a Thatcherite. See below, April 1.) I’ve been reading some blog comments today on Khan’s election which have reacted to it with a disgusting level of Islamophobia, but no-one takes these as typical. Khan’s election in itself would seem to disprove that. And incidentally, the scale of anti-Semitism – the other kind of ‘Semite’: for aren’t Arabs Semitic too? – is even more miniscule, whatever calculating Tories pretend and vigilant guardians of Israel may genuinely think. That fuss was mainly a ruse to ‘get at’ Corbyn.

Let’s hope that Sadiq Khan, within the narrow remit he has as a mere ‘mayor’, can fulfil the hopes placed in him. Controlling the free market to provide affordable London housing must be his main priority, after the Boris Johnson years of encouraging foreign millionaires to buy up prime properties as ‘capital investments’. Then it would be good if he could demolish that ghastly misshapen skyscraper in Fenchurch Street known as the ‘Walkie-Talkie’. (He must have some planning powers?)

But his main significance lies in his election itself: as a son of working-class immigrants – a London bus-driver and a seamstress – brought up on a Council estate (almost all of these are ‘privatised’ now), and still openly retaining his Muslim identity, in a city where big money and an Eton education (both represented by Zac Goldsmith) have been making all the running for years; and at a time when his ‘sort’ could so easily have been painted as the ‘enemy’ – bombers, machete-wielding zealots – as Goldsmith intended, if Londoners had not been more discriminating.

As a Londoner originally – albeit an outer suburbanite – I always rather despised the place, preferring more sheerly beautiful foreign cities (Paris, Stockholm, San Francisco…), and wishing I didn’t come from there. For years now I’ve been trying to take on a more provincial identity. But I can now see, I think, what Sadiq Khan meant, when he described it, in his victory speech, as ‘the greatest city in the world’. It has always been – always – a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural place. That’s reflected in the culture that has arisen there: I can’t imagine Shakespeare’s mind being so broadened and stimulated if he’d stayed in boring mono-ethnic Stratford. Occasionally – where foreigners arrived together in large numbers – this has caused trouble. (The East End was Oswald Mosley’s main – indeed just about his only – popular recruitment area.) But generally London has been ‘big’ enough, in all senses, to welcome strangers, to its and our huge benefit. That must make it pretty great.

We lost to the Lib Dems in my ward. A great shame; Rosie was a terrific councillor. I was on polling station duty again, as a ‘teller’ – sitting in the sun for six hours, asking the voters for their numbers so that we could cross them off. Only a few refused to divulge them, as they’re entitled to, of course; probably under the illusion that we could use them to find out how they voted. Most of them were big men with tattoos and scowly faces and meek little women following them, also declining to divulge their numbers, but apologetically. I put them down on my little pad as ‘UKIP’. So if their motive was secrecy, it didn’t work.

Then back to follow the coverage on TV in bed. It was pretty dispiriting: all the emphasis on what it meant for the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, whom the commentators (especially one awful woman) clearly felt very superior to. Dozed off, I’m afraid. Waking up in the morning I found that the results for Labour in England and Wales were nothing like as bad as had been predicted; but that just meant the commentators shifted their focus to Scotland, where Labour, of course, had never stood a chance against the Nats. I’m still waiting for the London Mayoral result. And the votes for ‘Elected Police Commissioners’, though that (fairly new) position is not really taken seriously. I spoiled my paper for that.

It seems to me that after all this, things remain very much as they were. Nothing has changed, or been ‘proved’. Everybody thinks the crucial vote will be the EU Referendum on June 23^rd. That’s not a party question – far from it – so they won’t be needing ‘tellers’. Once that’s out of the way, we can get back to the issues that should have dominated yesterday’s elections. And make the Tories pay.

Let’s get this straight. There’s criticism of the policies of the government of Israel. Then there’s anti-Zionism, directed at the ideology behind the foundation of the State of Israel and its expansion. Thirdly, there’s anti-Judaism, critical of the Jewish religion. And fourthly, there’s anti-Semitism, or hostility to the Jews on grounds of their ‘Semitic’ race. These may possibly overlap, with anti-Zionism’s being a supposedly more respectable cover for anti-Semitism, for example, or anti-Semitic feeling in reality infusing all these positions; but this certainly doesn’t follow, and isn’t always true.

Likewise statements of historical fact, such as that Hitler supported the removal of Germany’s Jews to Palestine as an early solution to his ‘Jewish problem’ before he hit on the ‘Final’ one, or that Israel’s foundation was an essentially imperialist project at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs (whatever the extenuating circumstances), should not be taken to indicate ‘anti-Semitism’ on the part of those expressing them, although they may do. (‘Holocaust denial’, however, almost invariably does; although I suppose you could say that the deniers have simply made an honest mistake.)

I’d even go so far as to say that proposals to evacuate the Jews from Israel to the United States, or anywhere else, are similarly not intrinsically and essentially anti-Semitic, although of course they are anti-Zionist. You might believe that removal would be in these good people’s best interests. Other religious communities have flourished, as communities, even ‘nations’ in effect, in the USA.

In 2012 a film appeared, called And Europe will Be Stunned, featuring a fictional (I think) ‘Jewish Renaissance Movement’, whose aim is to return the Jews to their ‘home’: but not a home in Palestine. ‘It is,’ claims the supposed ‘Manifesto’ of the movement, ‘Poland that we long for, the land of our fathers and forefathers. In real life and in our dreams we continue to have Poland on our minds.’ Fictional this may be; but could not Eastern Europe be regarded as the most convincing ‘homeland’ of at any rate the Jews who originally came from there, rather than the land that was pledged to them by ‘God’ thousands of years before? (God has a lot to answer for in this context. Which is a good reason for disliking the Jewish religion; in my case in common with most other organised religions.) It was there that their modern culture was formed; there and thereabouts that they made their greatest contributions to world civilization; and there that a more enlightened and liberal surrounding population might allow them to live again. Unlikely, I grant; but Poland’s remaining Jewish population is actually recovering today. They could even be happier there, so long as they were no longer persecuted. The Middle East would undoubtedly be a happier place. So would every country threatened these days with violent Islamism (which isn’t an excuse for the latter). And – to return to the main question posed in this post – how could it be regarded as ‘anti-Semitism’ to want the Jews to come back and live with us?

That’s a logical – you might say ‘academic’ – take on this question. But of course it’s not a practical one. We might wish that the influence of Zionism within Judaism were less important, that the Israel colony had never been established, that it had behaved better when it was established – I’m thinking of the West Bank settlements here – despite the undoubted enmity and provocation of the Arab world, which of course have taken far more diabolical forms; that Hitler (and before him the Russian anti-Semites) had been stopped; that the Poles really would take the Jews back: and so on. But these developments are now a given. All we – the world – can do is to make the best of a bad job: defend Israel’s right to exist but try to dissuade her from what you might call ‘defensive excesses’; help her counter the Islamicist menace, but perhaps less provocatively: and see where that gets us. Personally I’d rather like the Israeli government to acknowledge the colonialist crime their forced occupation of Palestine originally constituted: in other words, to show some humility. That is, after all, what we Brits are expected to do with respect to our imperialism. Luckily there is a large minority in Israel and among its supporters abroad who are also thinking and feeling along these lines. Which is why it’s wrong to condemn Israelis, let alone ‘Jews’, indiscriminately.

This isn’t an anti-Semitic point of view. It’s largely shared, as I say, by liberal Jews. The trouble is that elements of it can be taken that way, by certain pro-Israelis and by – here in Britain – right-wing politicians who find it convenient to use the term ‘anti-Semitism’, which since the Holocaust has been just about the most serious charge you could lay against anyone, to smear their political rivals and enemies with. (Personally, I think this is pretty rich coming from Conservatives, in view of their own history! Surely it will rebound on them when someone unearths some of their tweets.) It’s for this reason that Labour leaders do need to be careful of what they say in public; even if what they’re saying may seem to be perfectly OK rationally and academically, and if a rational academic like me feels upset that one can no longer, in this climate, say reasonable things. I probably shouldn’t have said them here. So it’s lucky for me that the readership of this blog is so small.