Migration and History

Posted on March 21, 2016 by bernardporter2013

The travails of the British Conservative party, although a source of great interest and amusement to the likes of me, seem trivial by the side of the great problem besetting us all just now: which is – apart from the ongoing crisis of capitalism – migration. I say ‘migration’ rather than ‘immigration’ because, obviously, it is problematic at both ends; indeed, far more so at ‘their’ end – the Syrian refugees’ – than at ours.

It is also – what many people seem to be unaware of, or to forget – part of a recurring theme in human history (animal history too: but that’s outside my brief), ever since the first humans came out of the Rift Valley of Kenya to populate nearly everywhere else, and our particular breed of humanity somehow displaced the Neanderthals in Europe. (Who were, I’ve been told, despite their reputation, rather nicer.) Since then we have had huge population movements on all continents, and often between continents, with one group of people being displaced or complemented by another: in Britain by Romans, ‘Saxons’, Danes, Normans, Irish, Huguenots, French refugees, Jews, West Indians, Asians, Russian oligarchs and foreign footballers; and out of Britain by the English, Scots and Irish settling overseas, wherever the indigenous peoples let them, or were too technologically backward to resist them, in the movement known as ‘colonialism’. Elsewhere there was the German Drang nach Osten in the Middle Ages, and then revived under the Nazis; succeeded by Poland’s ethnic cleansing after 1945 of its western provinces of the Germans who had settled there (not often mentioned today); America’s and Russia’s colonising of their western and eastern frontier regions; and similar movements in the Balkans and the Middle East in recent years. I’m sure the same applies everywhere else. The Australian aborigines must have come from somewhere. According to recent scholarship, Native Americans were not originally ‘native’, but displaced an earlier population. In fact it is difficult to find truly ‘indigenous’ peoples anywhere, outside, I guess, the Rift Valley. The broad history of humanity has been one of migration; very occasionally into empty territories – terrus nullius – but more often into lands already claimed and populated, however thinly, by others.

This great recurring movement hasn’t always involved tension between the invading and receiving populations. Native (north) Americans apparently got on pretty well with their European immigrants early on, helping them, indeed, to survive the first winters in the latters’ new land. In Britain’s case, after the original waves of invasions, which usually – in typical mediaeval fashion – involved pillage, rape, slaughter and worse (Romans against the original Britons, Saxons invading what was left of the Britons, Vikings terrorising the Saxons, then the Normans brutally suppressing both), many of the later incomers were tolerated pretty liberally, with much less persecution of the Jews than in most European countries, and political refugees (my area) received tolerantly, at worst. By and large modern Britain has been, I believe, surprisingly successful in integrating ‘blacks’ into her society, although that has been largely due to those ‘blacks’’ being willing to integrate themselves; and of course it takes time, and can be endangered by religio-cultural antagonisms, on both sides, as we see in the case of some Muslim incomers today. On the whole, however, Britain has shown how even fairly large-scale immigration can be adjusted to, over a short period of time. The United States  also prides itself on this – the ‘melting-pot’ – but has been only patchily successful in the cases of African and Hispanic Americans. Even the history of Islam – one of the most exclusionist and intolerant cultures in the world, judging by its practice over the centuries (and by bits of the Qu’ran) – throws up some examples of different cultures living together in amity, and to everyone’s mutual benefit; in Spain, for example, and much of the Middle East before Bush and Blair stirred up that particular hornet’s nest.

I’m sorry: I have no particular lesson to offer from this. Although mass migration has always been with us, it has been in a variety of circumstances, none of which is strictly comparable to the present day. The solutions seem to be pretty obvious, but no less intractable for that. (1) Stop the war in Syria. That would cut off the supply at a stroke. (2) Increase the compulsory minimum wage in Britain, which would stop Eastern European migrants (another category of immigrant entirely) from simply undercutting workers here. Alternatively, restore intra-European border controls. (3) Share out the (accredited) Middle Eastern refugees fairly among the members of the EU, so that almost the entire burden isn’t borne by Germany and Sweden, thus undermining their generosity by stimulating nativist movements there. (4) Institute proper government programmes for the housing, feeding, training and employment of the refugees, with a regard to (a) the employment needs of each receiving country, and (b) whether or not they intend to stay after the crises in their own countries are over. But everyone knows this.

In the particular historical example of immigration into Britain I’m most familiar with – nineteenth century refugees – none of this was done. It couldn’t be; it required government intervention, and Britain was too ideologically laissez-faire for that. But history isn’t always a good guide for later times.

Nonetheless it’s worth bearing in mind from history  that migration isn’t new; and indeed has been one of the main threads running throughout the history of the world, with arguably more positive effects than negative, in the shape of the kind of cultural cross-fertilisation that is necessary to progress, in most circumstances.

This ‘liberal’ view of mine may be influenced by the recollection that as a postgraduate student at Cambridge I lived amongst an astonishingly varied collection of foreign nationalities, faiths and ‘races’ – Indian, American, Australian, New Zealander, South African, Brazilian, Ethiopian, Sri Lankan, Canadian, Irish, Nigerian, Egyptian, even a couple of Scots – in what I think was the most stimulating time of my life. I’m not naive enough to think that because I got on so well with all these other nationalities, others should also be able to. We all shared a common cultural ‘identity’ as scholars, after all, which trumped all the others. It must be more difficult for an unemployed man in Rochdale to feel a common identity, as a worker, with the Pakistani round the corner who has got a job. And in Cambridge the foreigners didn’t (quite) outnumber us natives. Numbers are crucial. That’s why they need to be shared out. If only the EU were the kind of organisation that could do this.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Tories, Austerity, and IDS

Posted on March 20, 2016 by bernardporter2013

Exciting things are happening in British politics just now, mainly Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith’s dramatic resignation from the cabinet on Friday. This is not as straightforward as it looks. Was it really over disability benefits, as he claims? If so, why didn’t he resign long before? We all thought the cuts were his doing, ‘IDS’ having long been regarded as the villain of the piece so far as welfare is concerned: see Steve Bell’s characterisation of him as a blood-stained vampire bat. Is it a sudden conversion, then, his Damascene moment? (He claims to be a devout Christian.) Alternatively, was it – as a lot of people are saying – a Machiavellian plot to boost the ‘Brexit’ side in the EU referendum debate, which overshadows everything in our politics just now, by gravely wounding George Osborne, the Chancellor who announced the benefits cut in his budget speech on Wednesday, and who, with his pal David Cameron, is on the ‘Remain’ side (remain in the EU, that is)?  Or, even more deviously: was it intended as a blow against Osborne’s well-known ambition to succeed Cameron as Prime Minister when the latter steps down, as he has said he will anyway before the next election? Their loathing for each other is apparently no secret. The haystack-haired clown Boris Johnson – Osborne’s main rival for the leadership, currently conveniently on a ski-ing holiday – is widely imagined to be rubbing his hands gleefully at the news of all this. Gosh what fun, for the Westminster-bubble commentariat! Policies and ideologies are such dull things. Clashing personal ambitions: now there’s something they can understand.

I would love to comment on this too, and might have done, were it not for my self-denying ordinance only to write blog articles from a position of special expertise or, at the very least, a new angle. Any angle that I can think of at the moment on the IDS affair has already been covered in great length and detail in the press. And I can’t even guess how it will all turn out. It might turn the tables in favour of Brexit: be the unexpected event that I warned could blow my own prediction of the referendum process (below, February 19) out of the water. It is bound to damage the government, with its small majority in the Commons, in some way. It has surely undermined the awful Osborne’s credibility fatally. It should boost Corbyn’s Labour Party; especially the final point IDS makes in his toxic resignation letter, which is that it seems wrong to take benefits away from society’s poorest and most vulnerable in a budget which also rewards the rich with tax cuts. IDS even quoted Cameron’s great mantra – that ‘we’re all in this together’ – against him at the very end. Narrow economic ideology (cutting the deficit) has, IDS claims, overridden the real interests of the people. This of course is precisely what Corbyn has been banging on about for months. Surely Labour can profit from this?

None of these musings is original, or within my professional comfort-zone, so perhaps I should leave it there. But first let me finish with one point that I haven’t noticed being emphasised elsewhere yet.

One of IDS’s complaints, as I understand it, is that these social welfare cuts were decided on and announced by the Chancellor in his budget, instead of by the Department and the minister most closely responsible for them. In other words, the Treasury is taking over policies that ought really to be none of its direct concern. That implies that it is the economy (or Osborne’s view of it) that is dominating everything. There’s nothing that cannot be regarded purely in economic – that is, profit and loss – terms. This is capitalism ad absurdum.

Likewise: another policy announced for the first time in the same budget statement was the conversion to ‘Academy’ status of all schools in England, whether parents and teachers want it or not (and they often don’t); together with the abolition of local authority control, and of ‘parent governors’, even; all as a prelude, we assume, to making them into profit-making enterprises, like in Sweden. (On the Swedish version, see below, December 5, 2013.) Quite apart from the intrinsic and substantial arguments against this ‘reform’, which are many, what on earth is the announcement of it doing in a Finance bill? – More evidence, surely, together with the Trump phenomenon (below, March 10), that Marx was right all along.

But at least IDS has kept Trump off our front pages for a bit. Perhaps we should thank him for that.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Cambridge and homosexual harassment

Posted on March 17, 2016 by bernardporter2013

When I went up to Cambridge in October 1960, I found myself, for the first time, in the company of public schoolboys. My college (Corpus Christi) boasted – if that’s the word – a higher proportion of them than most, about 90%, I would say, all fitting in perfectly naturally to the ethos of the place, which I, at first, found strange and rather wonderful. They were all very pleasant to me, despite my ‘Estuary’ accent and the fact that I had lived at home during my school years, and I made close friends of a number of them. But there was always this barrier – of adolescent experience – between us. They knew things that I didn’t.

One thing was the proclivities of one particular Fellow of the college, the Rev E Garth Moore; who was obviously notorious in public school circles as a sexual predator: a fact that they felt they needed to warn me of, as a (comparatively) plebbish ingénu. ‘If Garth invites you to tea in his rooms’, one of them told me on my first day in college, ‘don’t go. We know about him. You won’t understand.’ I think they were trying to protect me from embarrassment, rather than from any worse fate. It was kind of them. Anyhow, I did get the invitation, and politely turned it down.

After that first tea party I was filled in on what had gone on. The conversation had turned to art, and in particular the art of the nude. Garth had a theory, that the ideal of the male body differed in Greek and mediaeval times. It rested on proportions. He then got his guests to strip to the thighs, and measured each of them ‘from nipple to nipple, and nipple to crutch’, to determine whether they conformed to the Greek or the Gothic ideal. My new upper-class friends were right; I would have been embarrassed. He also used to walk naked in our college gardens, among the students there.

Garth was a tutor in Law, his first specialism before he became ordained in the Church of England. He had high-up positions in the Church hierarchy: as ‘Chancellor’ of various dioceses, whatever that means; as well as being the part-time vicar of a London parish. His main published academic work – possibly his only one – was a slim guide to Canon Law. Later, when I became a Fellow of the college, I got to know him better, and instinctively took against him. He had extreme right-wing views; but it was his general air of polite but sinister creepiness that alienated me. He was one of the reasons – though not the main one – why I resigned my Fellowship two years later, to take up a Lectureship at Hull, where I felt far more comfortable. Cambridge, as I say, was a different world. Or was I just unlucky in my choice of college?

Garth Moore died in 1990. But yesterday the Guardian ‘outed’ him on its front page as the perpetrator of ‘a sadistic assault’ on a 16 year-old boy named ‘Joe’ in his London flat in 1976: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/15/damning-report-reveals-church-of-england-failure-to-act-on-abuse. (In fact he was originally outed by the Church Times last December, but I somehow missed that.) That was in connection with the Church hierarchy’s ‘covering up’ of complaints such as Joe’s. All very Spotlight. But I’d have thought responsibility rested equally with my college, acting – as universities were supposed to then – in loco parentis. Garth had young men in his care. I was only three years older than ‘Joe’ when I came across him. They might at least have warned me.

Of course it’s a big jump from an interest in young men’s bodies to full-scale rape. I very much doubt whether Garth assaulted any of my friends at Corpus. (Consensual sex, possibly. Some of my friends were clearly up for it.) And perhaps one should not be too judgmental of men afflicted with urges from which, mercifully, onesself is free. Then, of course, there’s the time and place to take into account. The atmosphere was different in the 1960s. From what I gathered from my public school friends, these things were accepted among their class then. For them, it was all a part of growing up; a bit like girls having to learn to cope with heterosexual harassment.  Garth’s ‘nipple to crutch’ fondlings were just a bit of fun.

Perhaps they were. It was only the lower orders, with their stiff morality, who objected. Or were embarrassed, like me. And the upper classes had pretty fool-proof ways then – mainly their tribal loyalty – of hiding it from them. It’s this, I think, that repelled me most: the subterfuge and conspiracy that surrounded them. (Certainly not the homosexuality per se. Though its illegality at this time will have been largely responsible for the secrecy.) Later, when I began researching into the history of MI5, that made a lot of sense to me.

I notice that the Guardian report doesn’t mention Garth Moore’s role at Cambridge. I don’t suppose that, back at Corpus, they’ll thank me for this exposé (if they get to see it – here or on the LRB blog, where I’ve also posted a version: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/03/17/bernard-porter/clerical-abuse/). There goes my invitation to the next reunion dinner! But those are pretty ghastly occasions anyway. The upper classes don’t seem to improve when they grow up. (Apart from three or four like-minded old friends I met last time. You’re exonerated.)

I hasten to add that I was never importuned personally at Cambridge. I probably wasn’t attractive enough. Or Garth suspected (without checking) that my nipple-to-crutch ratio was wrong. In fact I was very happy there. Until I joined the Fellowship, and was forced into the company of the likes of him.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Islam and the British Empire

Posted on March 14, 2016 by bernardporter2013

A couple of years ago I was asked to comment, in a Swedish TV interview, on a series of three documentaries, called Clash of Worlds, originally shown on BBC2, but still accessible on YouTube. (Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E9cXw-TXBI&list=PLi7XUXYkpEgnWhhazbReib9BHEfYuGh2_) I was sent an advance copy of the programmes; and, as well as the interview, wrote this piece, but never published it. It is still I think pertinent today.

*

When one sees Islamic extremists justifying their war against the West, it is very often on the grounds that, since the Crusades, the West has been waging war on Islam. You hear it every day. That is why President GW Bush’s immediate post-9/11 call for a ‘crusade’ against terrorism was so appallingly insensitive. It confirmed their suspicions. It is also why the television series Clash of Worlds is so problematical.

It describes three episodes in the history of British imperialism: the Indian ‘Mutiny’, the conquest of the Sudan, and the Balfour declaration. So far so good: deeply problematical events, all of them; even – I would say – shocking; hugely provocative to Islam; and clearly (especially the last) contributing in great measure to the current terrible situation in the Middle East. It is right that British people should be made aware of all this; many – probably the majority – aren’t. But Clash of Worlds does not stop there. It presents these events as parts of a deliberate crusade against Islam, essentially fuelled by evangelical Christianity. It’s all there, in the narration. These were ‘clashes between a Christian British Empire and Islam’; ‘a war of religion’ (on both sides); ‘almost a holy war’; ‘Britain’s jihad’; and so on. In every case the ‘Christianity’ of the British participants is emphasised, even when that Christianity was merely token, or clearly secondary. All this will have added more fuel to the paranoia of any Islamicists who watch this series. I may be being alarmist here – I certainly hope so – but I can imagine some of them strapping on their bomb belts when they see the series.

The charge is ludicrous. The British Empire was many things: I’ve written about it as being (in part) racist, sexist, greedy, exploitative, patronising, brutal and insensitive. But it was never a Christian crusade. The evidence for this is overwhelming: the tolerance towards all religions it almost always displayed – often for cynical reasons – and towards Islam in particular (because it was considered to be a more ‘manly’ religion than Buddhism); its general policy of ruling through indigenous cultures and systems, including Moslem ones; the discouragement by successive colonial and Anglo-Indian governments of Christian missionary activity; the fact that it was far too short-staffed to go around proselytising even if it had wanted to; the complex mixture of other motives that went into imperialism, many of them entirely incompatible with the Christian one… and so on. Even in the three events the series specifically concentrates on, religion – on the British side – was a very minor agency, and Islamophobia scarcely a factor at all.

Of course there were exceptions. Britain had its oddball Christian nutters too, though nowhere near as many as in today’s USA. (One irritating feature of this series is its constant attempts to draw exact parallels with the present. So, for example, nineteenth-century Moslems who pledge to ‘fight to the death’ are equated with suicide bombers; British ‘Christian Zionists’ are discovered in 1920s Palestine: though, lacking contemporary evidence, the film has to illustrate this with shots of a tourist party of modern American crazies there; and the ‘Mahdi’ – Muhammed Ahmed – whose army killed General Gordon in the Sudan is elevated into ‘public enemy number one’ in Britain for years afterwards, just like Osama bin Laden. That is rubbish; and in fact all these are hopeless anachronisms.) Gordon was one of those nutters, who may have wanted to convert the Moslems into Christians – though he was in the Sudan originally to rescue them. One of the factors behind the Indian ‘Mutiny’ was probably the sudden rush of holiness that grabbed many (European) Indian army officers for a short time in the early nineteenth century, just at the time they issued those bullets coated in pork and beef fat – an insult to both Moslems and Hindus – which was the revolt’s immediate spark. And there may have been one or two (but very few) supporters of a Jewish state in Israel who were motivated by their Christianity. (The main motives were entirely different – possibly less honourable.) Other British aims could be seen as religious, if they were directed at institutions Muslims regarded as essential to Islam: like gender inequality, and the Arab slave trade in Africa (especially the Sudan), the abolition of which was a British aim. (But then one imagines not all Moslems would have gone along with that.) In view of all this, one can understand the interpretation that some Muslims have put on these events: that the British have always had it in for their religion. But when they are looked at dispassionately, it is clear that this is a very partial and distorted view. A deliberate war of religions, on the British side, this was emphatically not. If it’s good to remind Britons of how harmful their country’s past blunders have been, wouldn’t it also have been good to suggest to Moslems that this – blunders – is what they mainly were?

*

This I think raises a larger issue. I have no problem with non-historians producing films about history: so long as they take authoritative advice. I’ve worked myself in very ancillary roles on a number of BBC and ITV documentaries, and found their producers highly amenable to suggestions; all these pieces have gained from my involvement, I think, not only in accuracy, but also in more exciting ways. The Clash of Worlds series interviewed a small number of very reputable historians on specific events and issues (these were in my view the best parts of the films), and I was told by Blakeway – the production company involved – that ‘scripts’ were sent to historians (I presume specialists) to check. But no general historian of imperialism, or of international relations, is credited with any input; and none appears to have viewed the complete series before it was delivered to the BBC. (There’s many a slip ’twixt script and film.) Remember, that it’s the overall ‘angle’ of the series that is mainly objectionable.

This seems to me to be almost incredible. When we academics produce books and articles, for a readership of (sometimes) only a few hundreds, we and our publishers always seek third party scrutiny of the whole finished products. It is surely even more incumbent on the makers of films likely to be seen by tens of thousands, especially when those makers are essentially ignorant in this field, to go through the same kind of process. It’s from films like this, after all, rather than our books, however popular we try to make them, that the general public gets its ideas about history. And the TV reviewers won’t know any better. The expertise is out there, in the academic community and elsewhere. It’s not expensive: many of us academics would give it for free. So why not seek it out? That doesn’t seem to have happened, at least adequately, in this case.

Compounding this, and even more shocking, I think: the BBC made no effort itself to properly examine and seek advice on the series before showing it. (It doesn’t deny this.) That, I have to say, surprised me more. I realise that the BBC no longer makes many films of its own, instead buying the programmes of private production companies; but surely that should make it all the more necessary for it to carefully check the products it receives, over whose creation it no longer has full control. Indeed, that should be the BBC’s responsibility, as a public corporation, directly funded by you and me. In this case I’m told it simply took on trust the competence and accuracy of Blakeway, on the strength of that company’s ‘reputation’. (Much of that reputation apparently rests on Niall Ferguson’s Empire series, which the BBC must know was highly controversial, to put it mildly, among historians; though at least that had a historian to write it.) SVT, by contrast, did not take the series on trust. That’s why they contacted me – a British imperial historian living in Sweden. They were also aware of the sensitivity of this subject. It’s even more sensitive in Britain; so surely the BBC should have sought outside professional advice too?

In the course of my correspondence over this with the BBC, the point was made to me that ‘history may be dangerous, but it should not be suppressed for that reason, for fear of political backlash’. That was meant I think to shame me; but in fact it betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. First, I never requested ‘suppression’: only discussion, either before the films went out or (publicly) afterwards. If only the BBC had responded constructively – or at all – to my concerns at the start! Second: what I was objecting to was emphatically not ‘history’, but its blatant distortion; ‘myth’ rather than history, if you like. Thirdly, there are dangers and dangers. I may be exaggerating the effect these films could have on impressionable and already aggrieved young Muslims; but the quality of this particular danger surely necessitates some sense of responsibility in the light of it. If the history in these films were good, I think I would tolerate their dangerous nature. It is one thing to be inflamed by the truth – and there’s a lot in the true British colonial record that ought to inflame people; but it’s quite another to put out inflammatory distortions of this kind.

Let’s take a hypothetical parallel. It would be perfectly possible, by the methods used in these films, to create a series of documentaries showing that it was Islam’s aim throughout its history to destroy all other religions, including Christianity; so explaining and justifying non-Moslems’ suspicion and hatred of it. Islam created, through war, an empire that was in many ways more impressive than the British, even including parts of Europe; and which was possibly the only empire in history that really was founded in and motivated by religion. You can find quotes in the Qu’ran to back this up. (This may be partly why Islamists impute the same motives to the British Empire.) It was frequently dogmatic and intolerant, and perpetrated what today we would regard as atrocities. In the eighteenth century Europeans were terrified of Moslems, who captured and enslaved thousands of them, as well as all those Africans in the nineteenth century that they then sold onto the Europeans. Extremists in Britain today still profess the conversion of the whole world to Islam as an aim. Several books have been written about this. I reviewed one a few years ago, by Efraim Karsh (above, March 30) – but critically, because I thought it was putting only one side of a complicated picture (as we all know, there were periods and places where Moslem imperial rulers were wonderfully tolerant); and because, being distorted, I thought it ran the danger of fanning Islamophobia even more. Wouldn’t the BBC be careful, before it broadcast a series along these lines, to make sure it had got it right? Or would it adopt the same attitude: ‘that history may be dangerous, but should not be suppressed for that reason, or for fear of political backlash’?

No, Blakeway, don’t even think of it!

Posted in British imperialism, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Trump: a historical parallel

Posted on March 14, 2016 by bernardporter2013

A decisive moment in the career of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, is supposed to have been a rally at Olympia on 7 June 1934, where violent scuffles broke out as hecklers were brutally removed by his ‘Blackshirted’ henchmen; resulting in bad publicity not so much for the anti-fascists as for Mosley himself. Mosley was adjudged to have provoked it. Popular support for the BUF, despite the backing of the Daily Mail (of course) – ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ – went downhill after that. This is eerily reminiscent of recent events in Chicago and Cincinnati, though it’s doubtful whether the outcome for Trump will be the same. Present-day America may be less shocked by violence than 1930s Britain was. Anyway, isn’t it already too late?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Elgar for Lefties

Posted on March 13, 2016 by bernardporter2013

A very fine talk yesterday at the Elgar Society Yorkshire Branch (of which I’m Hon Treasurer): Rachel Cowgill on what she called ‘Elgar’s War Requiem’ – which is what it is. Unfortunately it’s formally entitled The Spirit of England, which has put people off it in the past, assuming it’s a patriotic tub-thumper. It’s very far from that; more a sad reflexion on sacrifice, with its final section – ‘For the Fallen’ – one of the most beautiful and emotional choral pieces Elgar ever composed. I’ve written about it myself; but Professor Cowgill added so much more to what I already knew.

It’s yet another nail in the ‘Elgar as imperialist’ coffin, which I’ve been trying to bang nails into for years: viz. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hhCfzoqaLK0C&pg=PA19&lpg=PA19&dq=Elgar+and+the+Empire+%22Bernard+Porter. (Land of Hope and Glory – not Elgar’s words – has a lot to answer for.)

But the piece also I think undermines his reputation as a religious – specifically Roman Catholic – composer. Catholicism provided the texts for some of his early works: especially, of course, his great masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius, though I can’t help feeling that the very human Gerontius story moved him more; and I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that his later oratorios indicate a considerable falling-off in religious inspiration. Certainly, what faith he may have had was already growing very thin well before the Great War, which killed it off almost completely. The Spirit of England contains not a single reference to religion, at least in the text (Rachel Cowgill pointed us to some musical references back to Gerontius); and is inspired entirely by humanity. Listen to that last section; without weeping, if you can.

So, a reason why it’s OK for an agnostic anti-imperialist to love Elgar’s music: as well as church architecture (see below, March 2). George Bernard Shaw, of course – no Tory he – was a great fan.

*

The discussion afterwards touched on why Elgar called it the ‘Spirit of England’ rather than ‘of Britain’. I suggested, waspishly, that the ‘spirit’ or at any rate the ‘image’ of Scotland is – or was – rather different from the one he attributed to England: more aggressive and triumphalist; and so didn’t fit in with the music he was composing. It’s certainly true that Scotland was in many ways the most ‘imperialist’ of the four British nations in the 18th and 19th centuries; though that didn’t tie in with her self-projection – as a colonial ‘victim’ – at the time of the recent independence referendum. My friend the Anglo-Scot John Mackenzie has written about this.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Harold Wilson

Posted on March 11, 2016 by bernardporter2013

Happy 100th birthday to Harold Wilson, a great reforming Labour Prime Minister, shamefully traduced by both the Right and the Left since his retirement and death, but intelligent, progressive, politically savvy, a real man of the people, consensual, and with great achievements to his name; among them some revolutionary social reforms, the Open University, decolonisation, and keeping us out of Vietnam. And he didn’t make a penny out of his incumbency, unlike some we could name.

He was loathed by the contemporary upper-class Establishment, mainly because of his Yorkshire accent, I think. (I came across that prejudice at Cambridge.) They certainly plotted, subvertly, to bring him down, and may have succeeded. (The part played by these conspiracies in his surprising resignation in 1976 is not yet clear.) In retrospect, however, he towers head and shoulders above them.

Hopefully it won’t be long before he is rehabilitated historically. The miserable period since his departure can be regarded as a reaction against what he stood for and did. Thatcher was his complete antithesis. Now that her turn is being widely seen for the long-term disaster it was, we may have more time for Harold: for progressive social reform, that is; international disengagement; and even the Trade Unions.

*

A further thought. The Right-wingers and spooks who plotted against Wilson in the 1960s and ’70s did so because they affected to believe that he was a KGB agent, preparing the way for the catastrophe of a Soviet takeover of Britain. Most of the rest of us condemned that (a) because it was nonsense, as of course it was; but also (b) because it was anti-democratic, and even laudable ends didn’t justify illegal means. Looking forward now, equally fearfully, to the prospect of a President Trump with his finger on the nuclear button, I’m wondering whether I would necessarily take that latter line, if a conspiracy of some kind (short of assassination, which is sadly usually the American way) unseated him. That would seem to me to be almost our last hope. Which has helped me to understand the Wilson plotters, foolish as they were.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Trump: the long view

Posted on March 10, 2016 by bernardporter2013

I’m no authority on American politics, though I follow them closely – staying up all night to watch presidential election results, for example (all week in November 2000, over the ‘hanging chads’) – and have lived and worked in the USA. I was there when the clearly inadequate George W Bush was selected as Republican candidate, to the puzzlement – to say the least – of most Europeans, as well as many Americans. We didn’t think things could get crazier on the Republican front; but now – hey! – we have ‘The Donald’ heading the field. How on earth could that happen? As I say, I have no special expertise on this event worth sharing, especially with Americans, who must know their own affairs far better than even a fairly genned-up and sympathetic Brit can. What I may be able to contribute, however, is some broader historical perspective. For the current American election is not just about America. It also has global roots, as well as possible – and possibly frightening – global repercussions. These are relevant, too.

The first ‘global’ thing to say is that this is a phenomenon not confined to America, but manifested also in several European countries, albeit in different – less brashly ‘American’ – forms. There are pretty extreme right-wing parties and people emerging powerfully in every European country, some of them with leaders almost as silly as Trump (e.g. our own Nigel Farage); together with left-of-centre movements in some: Greece and Spain notably, but also Corbyn’s in the UK. The latter have their American equivalent in the ‘socialist’ Bernie Sanders’s surge among Democrats there: just as unexpected as Trump’s was on the Right, and in one way its polar opposite; but also emerging from the same political, economic and historical soil, and expressing a vague sense of grievance which is common to both wings.

That, of course, is the feeling that is rife on both sides of the Atlantic against ‘establishment’ or ‘conventional’ or ‘elite’ politics – ‘Washington’ or the ‘Westminster bubble’ – born of a feeling that those elites, and the big business that funds them, no longer represent ‘real people’, but only themselves. That may be true in a quite literal sense, in those countries like the USA and Britain whose electoral systems create complex barriers against the proportional representation of people’s opinions (see below, February 29). It is also aggravated by economic factors – the struggle that so many Americans and Europeans now have to maintain their living standards, let alone improve them, as was taken for granted in the past; by perceived threats from aliens – Mexicans in Trump’s America, Poles and refugees in Farage’s Britain; and – in America certainly, and on the European Right possibly – by discomfort at recent perceived national humiliations. ‘Make America Great Again’ is Trump’s main election slogan. Just imagine the shudders that would go down our spines if a German on even a British political leader fought an election on the slogan ‘Make Germany’, or ‘the British Empire’, ‘Great’ again. Look at Putin’s Russia. ‘Great’ is scary. It was Hitler’s big appeal.

Indeed, one alarming aspect of this, which I and many others have mentioned before, is the echoes it carries of the situation in the 1930s, which of course was what gave rise to European Fascism. Critics of this historical analogy object that it’s far-fetched to try and paint Trump as an identikit Hitler, or even a Mussolini, the more favoured candidate – it must be the jutting lower jaw and curling lip. But that is not what we’re saying; only that the situation now could give rise to a form of Fascism, in a very different American garb: probably for example leaving the Jews well alone. Fascisms, like other political ideologies, are rooted in material circumstances, but take their particular colours from the cultures around them. From the tasters we’ve had already – McCarthyism in the 1950s, for instance, and even Trump’s own statements on torture and suppressing press criticism – Trumpian Fascism would be coloured rather differently.

At the very core of his appeal, as well as of Bernie Sanders’s, must lie the obvious failures of the world economic system since the turn of the present century; just as the Great Depression is universally acknowledged to have lain behind the rise of the ‘extremist’ politics of the 1930s. The clue to this is Trump’s frequent references to what he regards as unfair free trade agreements with foreign countries, and the outsourcing of products that could be made in America – smartphones are his favourite example – to, typically, China. The racism may be incidental to this, so far as his fundamental appeal is concerned, except insofar as it also presses the ‘cheap foreign competition’ button. Mexicans undercut the wages of American workers. This is a reasonable fear in Britain too, if we substitute Poles for Mexicans.

That of course is an argument against international capitalism, or ‘globalisation’, au fond; and one that resonates with Bernie Sanders’s followers too. I’ve seen Trumpists (Trumpeters?) interviewed on TV who say that if they couldn’t vote for Trump they’d vote for Sanders, over and above Cruz or Clinton, who are perceived as representing the neo-liberal elite that both are standing against. What unites these two apparent opposites is, basically, anti-capitalism, though the Trumpists may not realise it yet. Otherwise what would they be doing supporting one of their most outspoken, and richest (though that is disputed), capitalists for President?

That is the other aspect of this horribly fascinating contest that requires a broad historical perspective to make sense of it. And also an understanding, I’d say, of that great analyst of the successive ‘stages’ of economic development and society, Karl Marx. For could there be anything more essentially Marxist than a capitalist’s actually becoming President of the most capitalist country in the world, as capitalism approaches its Götterdämmerung? In the past you had plenty of enthusiastic pro-capitalists attaining high office – Thatcher was the prime example in Britain – and political leaders who dabbled in business, like George W; but businessmen themselves usually shied clear of political responsibility, if only because it wasn’t – or shouldn’t be, in strict free market theory – a very profitable enterprise. If they used their position to earn more money than they could do through industry or finance, it could only be because they could rig the market thereby, which was regarded as corruption. Besides, they tended not to believe in ‘government’, which they regarded as an incubus on enterprise, generally, and so felt uncomfortable participating in it.

That was how things were arranged in Britain during her increasingly capitalist nineteenth century, with middle-class industrialists and financiers happy to allow the remnants of their feudal upper classes to take on the burdens – and monetary sacrifices – of government, so long as the latter did roughly the former’s will. There were one or two capitalist MPs. (The newspaper store owner WH Smith was one.) But none of them ever became Prime Minister, as Donald Trump could well become President of the United States; and, moreover, because they were capitalists, with their bruited successes as capitalists being regarded as – alone, and without their boasting any other qualifications – fitting them for that role. That’s what you hear again and again from both him, and his supporters. His personal financial success can be translated into success for his country. ‘I’m rich, so I can make America rich.’ It also, he claims, makes him less beholden to other businesspeople – ‘I’m my own man.’ ‘What this country needs is a successful entrepreneur, not another politician.’ ‘He’s negotiated with stockholders, so he can negotiate with Putin.’ ‘He gets things done.’ These are his selling points. Literally.

This is an extraordinary development; the apogee, or, if you like, the reductio ad absurdum, of the political development of capitalism in the modern world. It’s difficult to imagine how much further in a Marxian direction it could go. For those who believe that capitalism has to advance to this ultimate stage before it can collapse under the pressure of its own contradictions, it’s almost as though the old KGB put him there. But then, if they were true Marxists, the KGB wouldn’t have felt that was necessary. Trump is a natural culmination, a product of impersonal historical forces – ‘scientific determinism’ – not of human conspiracies.

Of course that’s not all there is to it, and I’m not confident enough of any over-arching historical theories to want to insist that this quasi-Marxist one is the most important explanation of Trump’s rise. For the others, Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004) is still I think the best guide to the mid-Western state of mind that supported Bush in his two victorious elections, with ‘family’ issues like anti-abortion playing what would seem to Europeans to be a disproportionate part, and anti-elitism and even anti-intellectualism an even greater one, encouraging working Americans to vote against what appeared to Frank to be their obvious self-interest – a classic case, if you will, of ‘false consciousness’. Then it bolstered the ‘conservatives’ in the Republican Party; now it’s for their more radical outriders. These have to be factored in; as well of course as more recent concerns, anti-Islamism and a not unreasonable fear of terrorism being probably the most important; and broader cultural and historical ones, like those that fuel many Americans’ love of their guns, and residual white supremacism in the South. Plus sheer anger: you can see that on Trump’s face. And, of course, the extraordinary popular American psychology that actually warms to his bluster and bluff. Is that peculiarly capitalist? Salesmanship?

Or you could regard economics as lying behind all these, if you’re a more rigid Marxist than I am. At any rate, it seems to me that the latter – the broad economic factor, the rise of global capitalism – must be one of the factors behind these anti-establishment movements both of the Left and of the Right in the Western world, with Donald Trump being its ugly face.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 2 Comments

British imperialism forgotten?

Posted on March 8, 2016 by bernardporter2013

Young Owen Jones, who seems to be everywhere these days, and whose books and journalism I greatly admire, recently published on the Guardian website – and possibly in the print version too, though I couldn’t find it there – an interesting piece about the recent student campaigns to have public statues of Cecil Rhodes and Queen Victoria removed, as symbols of British imperialism. His main point was not that these memorials ought to be demolished – he didn’t pronounce on that – but that the campaign had been valuable in stimulating a debate about the British Empire which he, Jones, felt had been missing hitherto. ‘We don’t debate the British Empire’, ran the headline; ‘so applaud ‪#‎RhodesMustFall for making us remember our history.’ I actually added a BTL comment, despite my self-denying ordinance (below, Feb 22), asking him what planet he had been living on over the past few years. I imagine  Jones’s piece says more about his own previous neglect of the subject than about ours. There have been over 3000 other comments added since, which I don’t have time to trawl through to see if he replied.

There was a time when British imperial history was neglected – directly after the Empire’s fall; but also, as it happens, for most of the time it was on the go (see my The Absent-Minded Imperialists) – but assuredly not recently. There have been at least three major TV documentary series aired about it over the past 10-20 years, as well as programmes on specific colonial events (usually atrocities), dramas featuring it, and a host of both serious and popular books (and popular-serious, like mine), fiercely and widely debated in the press: Niall Ferguson’s are the most famous, or notorious, examples; and taken up, as I understand it, in school history syllabuses. Universities are full of it, not only in History departments, but also as an important part, now, of English and other ‘Cultural Studies’. These represent almost every possible viewpoint, with the majority being critical of imperialism: ‘Critics of Empire’ (the title of my first book) having always been common in the UK as well as abroad. Indeed, there’s a sense in which the Brits could be said to have invented ‘anti-imperialism’.

I have to admit that my objection to this bland statement by Owen Jones was tinged with just a little personal resentment, at the implication that I had been wasting my own time all these years. I’ve been working my socks off to present a sophisticated and nuanced view of British imperialism, warts and all, for nearly half a century. British Imperial. What the Empire Wasn’t (2015) is just the latest. My Lion’s Share (1975) has been staple fare in educational institutions since it first appeared. Surely some of this will have rubbed off?

Fortunately, and to my surprise, I have to say, in view of my earlier criticism of ‘BTL’ comments, a good proportion of his 3000 commentators clearly agree with me. Most of them are silly; one says merely ‘FART!’; but I must say that the general discussion – or the small part of it I had time to plough through – was a valuable one. It also goes to disprove Owen Jones’s initial statement: ‘We don’t debate the British Empire’. Unless, of course, all these 3000+ bloggers only came to the subject after ‪#‎RhodesMustFall.

Jones’s original piece is here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/students-queen-victoria-statue-cecil-rhodes-colonial-past

My views on the substantial question are summarized below: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/02/04/imperial-blame/

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Four Yorkshiremen updated

Posted on March 8, 2016 by bernardporter2013

I first saw the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch at a Cambridge Footlights ‘Smoker’ in the 1960s. That might have been its first outing. I have an idea that it was originally created by my old Thespian mate Bill Oddy (now better known as the birdy man. He won’t remember me. I was only the scene designer). Since then it has become one of the most famous British revue sketches of all time, endlessly repeated. For anyone – you must be a foreigner – who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, there are several versions of it on YouTube. Enjoy.

Recently there’s been a lot of stuff in the papers about how much worse off materially the new young generation are compared to mine. Few jobs, none of them secure; huge fees for college education; a diminishing chance of getting on the housing (ownership) ladder, and virtually none at all of being housed ‘socially’, so in the grasping hands of private landlords; benefits cut; the NHS failing around them; prohibitive seat prices at football matches, which used to be the working man’s one consolation… I could go on. Does the greater range of choice that late capitalism has brought us – iPads, flat-screen TVs, foreign takeaways, HBO – compensate for all that? We should ask the 20-odd year-olds.

In the meantime one could imagine an updated version of the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’. – ‘Free university education – aye, and maintenance costs too; full employment…’ etc. etc. And the punch line: ‘Tell young people that today, and will they believe you?’ In unison: ‘Nay.’

I’m not a comedy sketch writer. Someone else should have a go.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment