Porter’s Pensées

If Sir Philip Green had been a character in a Victorian novel, he’d have come to a sticky end. Immensely rich, a Conservative Party donor, responsible for the bankruptcy yesterday of BHS, from which he is reckoned to have siphoned off at least half a billion pounds before he cunningly offloaded it, leaving his workers with no jobs and no pensions; a tax-dodger on a monumental scale; owner of several luxury homes, three yachts (why does he need three?), one of which resembles those great aggressive-looking sharks that we see sometimes in the Stockholm Archipelago, and a private helicopter: all for no discernible benefit to humanity at large. And who do you think gave him his knighthood? Yes, TB himself. Anthony Trollope (The Way We Live Now), HG Wells (Tono-Bungay), even Kenneth Graham (Toad in The Wind in the Willows), would have delighted in writing an unpleasant nemesis for him.

For that’s how the Victorian and Edwardian literati treated their entrepreneurs. They despised them. According to an influential book published by the American Martin Wiener in 1981, English culture and the decline of the industrial spirit 1850–1980, this partly explains Britain’s modern economic failings.‘High culture’ in later nineteenth century Britain had been notably unsupportive of urban capitalism. Most artists ignored it; some novelists expressly attacked it (Dickens, Gaskell). As a consequence, even successful businessmen, and especially their progeny, used their dodgily-gotten gains to escape from the stigma of being ‘in trade’, and set themselves up as non-productive jumped-up aristos, fatally for enterprise. That argument was seized on avidly by the Thatcherites. Sir Keith Joseph, one of the most zealous of them, presented a copy of Wiener’s book to each of his cabinet colleagues. You can see why Thatcher was such a philistine; even a proud one. The British literary world had no complementary Ayn Rand to to bolster capitalist egos, by presenting entrepreneurs as heroes. Hence Britain’s long post-Victorian economic decline. That’s the story.

So Thatcher and Joseph set out to reverse this trend; pretty successfully, if measured by the ‘enterprise’ they stimulated, albeit less so if judged by the medium- and long-term benefits of that enterprise, as we can see today. Philip Green is a product of this reversal. He represents exactly the kind of entrepreneur Thatcher admired. She is known to have respected ‘Jewish’ enterprise in particular, and Green probably exemplifies this too – educated as he was at an Orthodox Jewish boarding school, Carmel College in Oxfordshire, known as the ‘Jewish Eton’. I have to say I find this rather unsettling, seeming as it does to confirm a certain stereotype. (Please don’t put me down me as anti-Semitic. It’s a difficult slur to avoid these days.)

And no, I’m not in the least envious (see below, April 12). I’d hate Green’s life-style, as related in this press report: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/25/bhs-philip-green-family-millions-administration-arcadia. Even the play-girls. (At my age.) So let’s hope the Victorian novelists’ curse awaits him ultimately. In the meantime there must be some suitable fat-cat-weight-bearing lamp-posts around…

Hull City look as if they’re going to be in the playoffs for promotion to the Premier League. This is what I wrote (for the LRB Blog) the last time they were promoted. Predictably – and as mentioned below – it was followed by a lot of sarky Southern comments BTL.

*

(May 2013.) I’m not sure that Hull City deserved to win promotion to the premiership on the grounds of their football – they’ve been rubbish in recent games – but it’s terrific for the city, and for its owner. With so much worldwide interest in the Premier League, playing there puts this poor, isolated and much denigrated town on the map. Quite literally: I remember the last time they were (briefly) in the Premiership checking into a hotel in Copenhagen, giving my Hull address, and saying (based on my experience abroad) ‘I don’t suppose you know where that is’. ‘Oh yes I do,’ the man replied. ‘It’s in the Premier League!’ Those of us who live there, especially if we originally came from the South (as I did, in 1968), greatly resent the way it’s generally presented by our softer neighbours. Being placed top of a list of ‘Crappiest Cities in Britain’ a few years ago hurt. My son, who lives and works in London, gets it all the time – though he copes well with it (mainly with humour). I must say it has added a personal dimension to my dislike of the metropolis – Tories, bankers, media and so on.

In the month that its football team was promoted, Hull was appointed Britain’s ‘City of Culture’ for the year 2017. Whether or not it deserved that is probably just as moot as whether it really merits being in the premiership. It has one or two great players, contemporarily and historically: William Wilberforce, Andrew Marvell, Philip Larkin, the Hull Truck theatre, the Housemartins, a big aquarium, and a university that is far better than its name makes it sound. (‘Hull’ is such a dull word, especially in a Hull accent: ‘’ll’.) The university was what drew me to the place originally. I’d hardly been north of Watford before, and I didn’t really know where the place was myself. But I like it here: decent and pretty friendly (as Yorkshire people go), laboring under terrible burdens inflicted on it by those said Tories and bankers, and with some wonderful country around. (Ask David Hockney.) I was happier at Hull University than at any of my others: which have included Cambridge and Yale; none of the latters’ airs, graces and snobbery. And housing is cheap. Where else can you buy a 4-bedroom Victorian house in a leafy inner suburb for under £200,000?

There’s another reason for welcoming the Tigers’ promotion. Like many football clubs now they’re owned by a millionaire capitalist: a trend I generally abhor; but in this case one with a difference. Assem Allam originally came to the UK as a refugee from Nasser’s Egypt, and to Hull to study Economics at the University. So he has a real connexion; unlike that crook Roman Abramovich with Chelsea, for example. He was so impressed with the welcome he got there that when he got rich, he decided to give something back to the city in gratitude. Rescuing the football team from near bankruptcy was his gift to us. I think it’s another thing the city can be proud of.

(Addendum, 2016: since then the fans have rather fallen out with Allam, for wanting to change the name of the club. But the main point stands.)

*

(Addendum II: Leicester’s much more miraculous rise this season must be doing the same for that city. Everyone’s supporting them, against the millionaires. I was even half-hoping they’d beat West Ham last week. In the event it was a 2-2 draw, with the help of a dodgy last-minute penalty for Leicester. So, Come on You Foxes, too!)

The new British TV police drama Undercover – which I’m recording, and will catch up with when I get back to the UK – was criticized in the Guardian today by a genuine victim: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/25/woman-who-lived-with-police-spy-criticises-bbc-drama-undercover. I wrote a piece on this for the Guardian a couple of years ago, reviewing Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, Undercover. The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police (Faber & Faber, 2013), which the series must be loosely based on. I thought it might be worth recycling here.

*

I can understand the attraction of being a spy. There’s the mystery, the play-acting, the adrenaline-rush of covert operations, the delicious fear of being found out. You are privy to information others don’t have, which gives you power over them. In some ways it is ‘like being God’, in the words of one of the London Metropolitan police spies featured in this book; especially, perhaps, if you are someone who feels that his or her life is rather pathetic otherwise. Of course you can also do it for principled and ideological reasons: because you genuinely believe you can do good this way. Wartime or even Cold War spies are likely to come into this category. That however doesn’t seem to have been the case in any of the examples chronicled here, of men (and one woman) who infiltrated radical movements in Britain in the 1990s and 2000s, with new names (often taken from dead children, in case anyone checked at the Registry of Births), long hair and beards (they called themselves ‘The Hairies’), and lots of sleeping around, to preserve credibility. They simply liked the thrill. (And the sex, one imagines.)

This however is one of the problems. For most decent people this sort of work is anathema. Espionage involves deception and betrayal, usually of people you have pretended to befriend, and in at least one of these cases women you have fathered babies with. It’s a sordid business, and doesn’t attract the most virtuous of people. So how can you trust the information they bring to you? How do you know they’re not provoking crimes, just to get the kudos for revealing them? (There are examples of this here.) How can you trust the authorities, with all this secretive power in their hands, not to use it for their own purposes – for example, to spy on and try to discredit their own enemies? (This also happened here: agents were charged with digging up dirt on critics of the Police, and even on the family of Stephen Laurence, whose case was notoriously mishandled by the Metropolitan force. You’ll have read about it recently in the press.) Lastly, how can you trust them to stay loyal; not to go ‘rogue’ – to blab to the newspapers, for example, which could undermine the whole exercise? That’s how the Guardian journalists Lewis and Evans got hold of this story: from a couple of ex-undercover agents who decided to spill the beans, apparently because they came to feel guilty about what they had been doing, which I suppose is to their credit. Another, Mark Kennedy, sold his story for money to the Mail on Sunday. It is interesting to read, by the way, how different the penitents’ versions were from Kennedy’s. The former had come to the realisation that the men and women they had been spying on were reasonable folk: kindly, harmless idealists in the main; and had seen them brutally beaten up by the police. They had obviously bonded with them. (That’s another danger: ‘going native’.) Not so the Mail’s source, which painted an entirely different picture of filthy, scavenging, wild-eyed terrorists whom Kennedy was now in hiding from, fearing for his and his children’s lives. That made him the victim, of course. (And will have confirmed Mail-readers’ prejudices.) One of them must be lying. But that’s the nature of the beast.

It always has been. None of this is new. That is not to say it has always gone on. For much of the nineteenth century it didn’t, partly because the British authorities were fully aware of the dangers; and partly because any hint of ‘domestic espionage’ at almost any level was regarded as unethical. Worse: it was seen as French. ‘Spylessless’ was one of the things that marked Britain off from the more tyrannical Continent: was a fundamental feature of her ‘national identity’, in other words. (Those who wish to use history to establish the nature of ‘Britishness’ might ponder that.) Even if it worked it wasn’t justified. ‘I would rather half a dozen people’s throats should be cut in Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years’, said one MP (a Lord) in 1811, ‘than be subject to domiciliary visits, spies, and all the rest of Fouché’s contrivances’. (Ratcliffe Highway was a notorious London crime spot; Fouché the chief of the Parisian secret police.) Political spies, especially, were some of the most excoriated villains of popular culture in the early nineteenth century. Governments couldn’t risk their use for many years after that.

That was one of the reasons. A more philosophical one was that domestic espionage undermined popular confidence in the authorities, so making the exercise of authority more difficult. If they don’t trust us, why should we trust them? These restraints gradually dissolved during the twentieth century, however, partly under the cover of the World Wars (looking for enemy agents), and then in the fever of paranoia that took hold of the classes that had anything to lose from socialism after the Russian Revolution. That came to a head in the late 1960s and 1970s – remember the farcical ‘Wilson Plot’ (against him, because they thought he was a Soviet mole)? – which was exactly the time, as it happens, that the ‘Special Demonstration Squad’ (SDS) which employed these particular people – motto ‘By Any Means Necessary’ – was secretly set up. The year 1968, of course – whatever it promised to be, and may have turned out to be elsewhere – can be seen in retrospect to mark the beginning of Britain’s Great Reaction, which has gone on (and on) since then. In Britain – this is obviously not true of everywhere – it is the Right which has generally been most willing to use underhand methods against its perceived enemies, and even to defend them openly: ‘if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear’. (Goebbels originally, I think, but echoed by Conservative ministers today.) It is also the Right, incidentally, who are the ones to cry ‘conspiracy theorist’ at anyone who suspects this kind of thing. In this case, in the view of Evans and Lewis, the conspiracy theorists have been ‘not nearly paranoid enough’.

The question remains whether these methods can be in any way justified by their results. The circumstances of today are different from those of the nineteenth century. It is arguable that there are more ‘subversive’ dangers now: though there were plenty of things going on then that the Victorians could have painted as ‘subversive’ if they had been so inclined. Maybe the switch from being the most proudly ‘spyless’ of nations to the (probably) most spied upon – surveillance cameras, GCHQ, Prism, industrial ‘blacklists’, hacking, and the like – had to come. But it is difficult to see the SDS fitting into this rationale. IRA and Islamist terrorists are one thing. (Bankers might have been another, if only we had realized where the real danger lay.) But tree-huggers, veggies, anti-imperialists and animal rights campaigners – the SDS’s main targets? Come on!

With all this kind of thing going on, it may not be surprising that popular trust in government is breaking down. It is what the Victorians would have expected. We’re no longer surprised by revelations like this, which is sad. The real sea-change, however, will have come about if we are no longer shocked by them. Then we really will have transformed as a nation. Hopefully the grotesqueries revealed in this compelling book will fire some of the old ‘free’ (and radical) British spirit again. But don’t wait up.

Here Jeremy Corbyn marks our ‘patriotic day’ entirely appropriately, in my view as a historian. (Ignore the BTL comments.)

https://www.facebook.com/JeremyCorbyn4PM/photos/a.1455997631360978.1073741829. 1455715994722475/1554555978171809/?type=3&theater.

Something that’s often forgotten about British (or English) ‘patriotism’ is that it was originally a radical concept. ‘Patriots’ in the eighteenth century were those who championed the British people against their foreign-imposed (Norman, Hanoverian) aristocracy. Hence Dr Johnson’s famous dismissal of patriotism as ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’. He wasn’t referring to the Daily Mail or UKIP kind. Then, towards the end of the nineteenth century, patriotism was appropriated by the Right, and in particular the imperialists, who have held on to it ever since. Perhaps we radical Brits should seize it back.

US patriotism is infused with the same feeling. Which is why we British oughtn’t to be as shocked as we often are by all those stars and stripes in American gardens.

(See how useful History can be?!)

And PS: Isn’t it interesting that multi-ethnic England  should have a Turk (I think) as a patron saint. And probably a fictitious one at that.

Today he’s been knocked off his plinth by an entertainer called ‘Prince’ – an odd name – and our lovely nonagenarian Queen. But I don’t imagine that will last long. Most of the time just now it’s Shakespeare. He’ll be 400 years dead this weekend, giving plenty of employment to the Bardic aficionados – writers, producers, actors – here in Sweden as well as in Britain. For a Shakespeare obsessive like me this is very welcome. (Not that we’re exactly starved of Shakespeariana at any other time. One or other of his plays are nearly always playing in Stockholm – Kurt Wallander performing King Lear recently was an eye-opener; or if not, then West Side Story or Kiss Me Kate.) I thought I ought to write something here to mark this anniversary; but of course I’m not an expert, only an amateur, and so my self-denying ordinance, only to comment on issues I have a particular experience or knowledge of (below, February 22), forbids that. I just have one idea that may be original, however, and derives from my study of cultural history generally. That relates to the vexed question of authorship.

I have to say that I have no doubts at all about who wrote ‘Shakespeare’s’ plays – apart from the smidgeon of doubt any thinking person ought to have about anything. (Perhaps the earth is flat.) It was a fellow called William Shakespeare, who hailed from Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, married an older woman called Anne, then moved to London, where he acted, and wrote. And wrote, and wrote. (He died aged only 52, remember.) If you need any further persuasion, James Shapiro’s superb Contested Will (2011) should do the trick. The surviving historical evidence for Shakespeare’s life is patchy, but there’s enough of it to leave no question of this. The ‘proof’ adduced by the doubters is flimsily circumstantial at best. They’re idiots.

What interests me, however, is the main reason they all give for doubting Shakespeare’s authorship: which is sheer snobbery. Their favourite alternative candidates are Sir Francis Bacon; the 17^th Earl of Oxford; the 6^th Earl of Derby; and Christopher Marlowe. Notice anything they have in common? They’re all nobs, except perhaps Marlowe, and he had a Cambridge education. (At my old college, as it happens.) What the anti-Stratfordians can’t stomach is the idea that Shakespeare wasn’t a high-born or highly-educated man. He came from the ordinary provincial middle classes. How could he possibly have known as much as he clearly did about the sufferings of kings, Renaissance Italy, and the Greek classics if he went to an ordinary grammar school near Birmingham, of all places? (Actually Birmingham hardly existed then.) No country yokel could have written ‘To be or not to be’. It had to be someone with the refinement bestowed by high birth and a privileged education. – But of course this is utter nonsense.

In fact if we look at most of the undoubted cultural geniuses in British history (and there were not all that many of them, compared with French, German or Italian), nearly all of them came from lower-middle class backgrounds. Turner, Constable, Purcell, Elgar, Dickens… all came from roughly the same stratum of society as the Stratford Shakespeare. I first latched on to this when I realized that most of the leading working imperialists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also came, not from a particular class in British society, and certainly not from the ‘uppers’, but from between the classes; and maybe for that reason. Uppers and middles had accepted and comfortable places within the British class system, and so didn’t need to strive, perhaps, or to look beyond their social confines. On the other hand the ‘interstitials’ – the word I coined in one of my books for those who fell uneasily between the classes – did need to. Nearly every one of the most important cultural and political figures in modern British history has been an ‘interstitial’. Will Shakespeare of Stratford falls into that category perfectly.

Indeed, one could go further, and say that if you were an upper or middle-middle class person, you were (and are) at a disadvantage if you wanted to do anything truly remarkable. How many sons or daughters of investment bankers have ever done anything great and original in any field (except banking)? I don’t know much about ‘Prince’, but I don’t imagine he really was a prince to begin with. And our beloved Queen, admirable as she has been in many respects, has not come up with any really great works of art that I know of. That’s a cheap point, I realize; but it may illustrate a truth: that it’s a terrible burden to live under, to be secure in your social position. Almost as burdensome as being male, if you wanted to be a famous writer in the nineteenth century. Have you ever wondered why there have been so many famous women novelists? Women were interstitial, at any time. (So am I, class-wise, I feel, which is maybe why I find this such an attractive theory.)

*

I was introduced to Shakespeare – the enduring love of my life – by a sixth-form teacher who would probably have failed any tests for teaching quality today. He was called William E Barron, nicknamed ‘Spud’ because he looked like a little fat potato, and had a silly high voice, which is why he couldn’t become the great actor he had clearly wanted to be; who nonetheless spent our classes acting out all the characters in King Lear, as well as filling in the bowdlerized dirty bits. I was transfixed, and have remained so ever since. Unfortunately he took against me at the end, because I decided to read History at University rather than English Literature. So I couldn’t thank him. He must be dead by now. If this blog is read Up There: thank you, Spud.

*

Recommended reading (apart from the Bard himself): two more books by James Shapiro: 1599 (2006), and The Year of Lear (2016). Good, for me, because they are excellent history, too.

Sweden’s relationship with the EU is almost as problematical as Britain’s. She only joined in 1995 – 25 years after us – and on the basis of a pretty narrow popular vote. At the same time, her neighbour Norway voted to stay aloof. Like us, Sweden has spurned the Euro. The majority political parties are all pro-Europe. Sweden used to have a UKIP of her own – known as Junilistan – which won 15% of the vote in the 2004 European elections, but which seems to have withered away since. The latest opinion poll put its support at 0.3%. There’s also a Folkrörelsen (‘People’s Movement’) opposed to EU membership on mainly socialist grounds, which is the direction you would expect Swedish Euroscepticism to come from. The ‘Vs’ (Left; ex-communist) are also anti-Europe. The right-wing Sverigedemokraten’s policy is to renegotiate the terms of Sweden’s membership, rather than to leave. The Greens are swithering. So the UK is not the only ‘semi-detached’ member of the EU.

Broader public support for continued Swedish membership has been waning recently – down to 44% in a recent poll (but with a large number of ‘don’t knows’), due mainly to Europe’s reluctance to share her refugee burden with her. The Swedes have also had other issues with the European bureaucracy over the years. It stopped them exporting snus, for example: those little sachets of snuff they insert between their teeth and gums; and has its greedy eyes on Sweden’s beloved Systembolaget, or State liquor-store monopoly.

All this might be thought to give the Swedes some empathy, at least, with Britain’s present predicament. And also a material interest in it, if – as recent polls are predicting, alarmingly – Brexit might push the sceptics into an absolute majority, and lead to Sweden’s following Britain out into the cold. (It’s already being called ‘Swexit’.) That could scupper the whole European project. (See http://www.euractiv.com/section/uk-europe/news/poll-majority-of-swedes-want-to-leave-eu-in-case-of-brexit/.) Is this really on the cards? If so, it must raise the stakes.

In view of all this, I’ve been interested to see – now I’m back in Stockholm – what the local media are making of Britain’s current civil war over Europe. The coverage of it in the quality press and on TV has been extensive. (There’s a discussion of it on SVT as I write.) Most of it is on the level of reportage, rather than comment. There’s plenty about the British situation for the Swedes to mock, of course, if they wanted to: stereotypical old British buffers like Nigel Farage and most Conservative backbenchers; and old myths about Britain’s post-imperial delusions to fall back on. There’s been some comment about how, generally, the debate ‘hasn’t shown the British at their best.’ (Prime Minister’s Question Time does an awful lot of harm to Westminster’s reputation abroad.) But on the whole the media have resisted the temptation to make too much fun of us. They have covered both the issues and the personalities involved in the current debate fairly and responsibly; in contrast, one has to say, with most of the British press.

But they are also puzzled. Why do the Brexiters want to leave? Or the Remainers want to stay? From their own national standpoint, Swedes can see good reasons on both sides of the argument. But no-one seems certain which are the important ones for the British. Democracy? Trade? Brussels bureaucracy? Immigrants? Xenophobia or –philia? Solidarity versus individualism? Narrow political calculation – pro or anti Cameron, for example? – And what would the Brexiters, in particular, do with their newly-won economic freedom if they got it? What exactly would a post-Brexit Europe look like? Let alone one without Sweden, if Swexit followed on.

In itself, however, that could be said to be a pretty fair reflection of the British situation. We’re asking the same questions. So the Swedish media have got it just about right.

(Thanks to Kajsa for essential help with this. A version of it was posted on the LRB Blog this morning.)

PS. I’ve just learned that the Swedish state is paying me a small retirement pension, in return for the little tax I’ve paid while here (mainly on our sommarhus). I’ve tried to turn it down, but they insist. I bet HMRC wouldn’t. Another reason for me to vote ‘Remain’.

Jeremy Corbyn is criticized because his support for continued British membership of the EU isn’t ‘enthusiastic’, ‘principled’ and ‘positive’ enough. But why should he pretend to be enthusiastic if he isn’t?

For any socialist the European issue must be a finely-balanced one. Traditional leftist internationalism should put us in favour of any kind of cross-border co-operation, so long as it doesn’t seem to obstruct a wider internationalism: in other words, in this case, resemble a ganging up of ‘white Europe’ against the rest of the world. (That’s where the old idealistic form of multiracial ‘British Commonwealthism’ scored over it.) On the other hand, a united Europe dominated by international neo-liberal ideology could be said to be worse than no united Europe at all. That’s the nub of the problem, for Leftists.

So far as I’m concerned, I’d probably vote for Brexit if I thought it meant we could escape the clutches of neoliberalism. But that’s emphatically not what the majority of the leading Brexiters want. And it’s certainly not what a Conservative government of a newly independent UK – shorn, perhaps, of its most left-wing province, Scotland, which would probably use the opportunity to secede – would legislate for. They are free-marketeers to a man (and the occasional woman). On the other side, there’s enough anti-austerity feeling on the Continent to give a better hope of escaping from or at least restraining neo-liberalism, than the British Left could offer on its own. That will be my reason for (probably) voting for ‘Remain’. But it’s not exactly an ‘enthusiastic’ or ‘principled’ one.

On the other hand I’d claim it’s more intelligent and rational. Politics is rarely clear-cut; international politics least of all. Corbyn’s reasons for supporting a united Europe – ‘warts and all’, as he puts it – are far more thoughtful and consequently reliable than the arguments of the zealots on either flank of the debate. I suppose it’s my being an academic that warms me in particular to them. Certainty is intrinsically foreign to most kinds of scholarly pursuit. Our irresolution often lays us, too, open to attack from outside. I remember publishers, planning the marketing of my books, complaining that I never seemed to come out unconditionally on one side of an argument, in a way that they believed was necessary to sell them. (‘Are you for Empire, or against?’) Going further back, it reminds me of my mother’s once asking me if I was a communist. ‘Well, it depends what you mean by communist.’ ‘No, answer me straight: are you a communist or not?’ We intellectuals don’t like questions like that.

It has only been relatively recently, I think, that simple, firm opinions and enthusiasm have been taken to be desiderata in public affairs. It began with Thatcher’s ‘conviction’ politics: ‘The Lady’s not for turning.’ That in its turn may have been a reaction against Harold Wilson’s perceived lack of ‘principle’; in other words, his willingness to compromise.Thatcher it was who defined what she called ‘leadership’ (translate that into German, by the way, to get a different view of it) in these terms: conviction, all-or-nothing, zeal for one idea or another; which it has never shaken off since. Hence the press’s gleeful seizing on ‘U-turns’, whenever a politician comes to his or her senses. Or on ‘inconsistencies’, when a new situation makes it irrational to stick by a belief one held forty years ago.

I can live with Corbyn’s marginal support for Britain’s remaining in the EU, far more easily than I can with the other leaders’ hyped-up enthusiasm. Never trust a zealot. That should be the golden rule.

Off to Sweden now. I wonder what they’re making of all this there?

I’ve been trying to think back to what I knew about Swedish history before I made my second home there twenty years ago. It turns out to be very little.

There were the Vikings, of course. As schoolchildren we loved the Vikings – far more than those awful Roman and Norman invaders. Raiding us in their wonderful dragonships, burning monasteries, slaughtering the poor English, and dragging our best-looking women off to Iceland to mate with them. (Apparently there’s as much British DNA in Iceland today as there is Nordic. I imagine – and this has been borne out by my experience since – that the Scandinavians’ own women were too tough and assertive to want to join in their menfolks’ ‘silly boys’ games’.) Pinned up on a door of a church in Essex, where I come from, there is – or at least used to be – a scrap of what looks like leather in a frame, which we learn is the pelt of a Danish invader skinned alive and put up there to deter any more from coming over. That still gives me a frisson to think about it. Oh yes, we knew about the Vikings.

But then my Swedish friends tell me that the ones that went about raping and pillaging were all Norwegians and Danes, quite different from the Swedes who merely traded peacefully with the peoples to the east. I must say I’m sceptical. But if it’s true, it turns out I know nothing about tenth-century Sweden, either.

After that – what? I studied history at university, but don’t remember Sweden ever coming into the picture before the end of the Second World War, and the wonderful ‘Swedish model’. No Gustavus Vasa, no stormaktstiden, no nothing. That’s a thousand years of – one could only assume – sitting around, eating raw fish, cross-country skiing, designing nice furniture, not troubling anyone, and cannily avoiding wars – even if that meant leaving others to save them from Hitler. (OK, sorry. I understand. I really do.)

My own first serious engagement with Swedish history came quite fortuitously. It helped fill in some of that thousand-year gap. I was researching on early Victorian British travellers on the European continent, and came across one who wrote three interesting books about, firstly Norway, then Sweden, then Denmark. He was called Samuel Laing (the elder), and came from the Orkneys, which of course have a far stronger Norse heritage than a Celtic or Pictish one. (They were actually part of Norway up to 1468. They still have annual longboat-burning ceremonies.) He was a businessman, whose kelp business failed, causing him to move to Levanger in the north of Norway, and start farming there. He found that as a Scot he could understand the Norwegians fairly easily – better than he could the English. He became interested in ancient Nordic literature, and published a translation of the Icelander Snorre Sturlasson’s Heimskringla, which is still in print. But it was his impressions of early nineteenth-century Norway and Sweden which interested me more; and laid the (somewhat unreliable) foundation of my knowledge of both countries thereafter.

Laing’s Scandinavian travelogues are fascinating in many ways – enough I think to be worth republishing, in translation if necessary, for modern Scandinavian audiences. Much of the material in them is about social customs in the two countries, some of which I recognised when I became acquainted with Sweden myself. (His descriptions of formal dinner parties are quite amusing. Refusing a third helping of the fifth course – probably more sill – he was accused by his angry host of ‘insulting the entire Swedish nation!’) But it was his political and economic observations that I found most fascinating. For Laing was an early and quite zealous champion of free market liberalism – he was cited as a source by John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy – which at that time was believed to be the best guarantee of economic equality between the classes. Things have changed, of course, since. (Mill wrote in a later edition of his Political Economy that if the free market turned out not to conduce to equality, he for one would become a ‘socialist’. Not many people know that.) This was why he so admired Norway, which he saw as a model of democracy, free trade and equality. And why when, on a later – and much shorter – visit to Sweden, he disapproved of that country so strongly that the Swedish ambassador to London wrote to Lord Palmerston to complain. The Norwegians were free, equal and happy; the Swedes still aristocratic-dominated, wasting their time with art (Laing hated ‘high art’), arrogant (especially towards the Norwegians), and far too regulated by the State. This explained their ‘immorality’ – the number of bastards born there – which was the slur that got up the Swedish ambassador’s nose. (Of course, Laing didn’t understand the ‘Stockholm Custom’ – is that right? I can’t find it on Google – which permitted sex before marriage.)

I have to say that on my first visits to Sweden some of this actually rang bells – the ‘statism’ in particular. (I don’t mind it.) Unfortunately I know Norway less well.

*

For anyone who’s interested, my writings on Laing are lost in rather obscure journals. “‘Monstrous Vandalism’: Capitalism and Philistinism in the Works of Samuel Laing (1780-1868)”, appeared in Albion, vol.23 No.2 (1991); and ‘Virtue and Vice in the North. The Scandinavian Writings of Samuel Laing’, in the Scandinavian Journal of History, vol. 21 (1999). I think they’re quite fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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