Porter’s Pensées

I listen to the radio all night. (I can’t be left alone in the dark  with my own thoughts.) I did the same when I lived in the USA. The fare there was usually crazier than on Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, which made it, of course, far more entertaining. (Like Donald Trump, for us lucky non-Americans.) I remember one interviewee indignantly justifying killing his wife and burying her on a mountainside because she hadn’t had his dinner on the table on time (‘well, what would you have done?’) – though I suspect that was a wind-up. Another interviewee, however, was deadly serious. The programme was a ‘phone-in’ about the British and American bombing of Dresden in February 1945. Someone mentioned the London Blitz of 1940. A caller maintained that this was launched in retaliation for the Dresden bombing. What interested me was his refusal to accept that he must have been wrong, in view of the chronology. This could not simply be a ‘matter of opinion.’ ‘But I’m a free American,’ he riposted, ‘and can believe whatever I like.’

This is true on one level, of course, but rather discouraging for those of us who believe in free rational debate. At the time I comforted myself by reflecting that this was probably a particularly American kind of libertarianism. It couldn’t happen in Britain, or at least not on so wide a scale as I met it nearly every day in America. That thought helped me to get to sleep at last. It is only in the past 5-10 years that I have – metaphorically speaking – been cruelly woken out of this illusion. The agency of this enlightenment – my vision on the road to Damascus – has been the internet, and in particular the discussions that go on ‘below the line’ (btl) of some quite sensible and rational posts. They have revealed to me the rank stupidity of a far larger proportion of the population than I had ever suspected. The shock of this has begun to undermine my belief in democracy, no less.

I recognise the flaws in this argument. (I try to be a rational being, after all.) Firstly, I was clearly being naive in not spotting this before btl started up. Stupid comments probably made up a majority of print editors’ post-bags, before editors edited them out for publication. (I’ve not been an editor, so I didn’t know that.) So it’s not new. The other flaw is that I could very well be over-estimating both the numbers and the significance of these trolls. (Is that the right word?) Maybe they only amount to a few hundred, after all. My initial suspicion, inferred from both the content and the style of their contributions, was that most of them must be pimply adolescents darkly crouched over their computers in their rooms when their mothers think they’re revising or tucked up in bed. That reassured me for one reason: if they were adolescents, it meant they didn’t have the vote. If the political fate of my country depended on large numbers of voters whose only contribution to any political discussion was ‘Osborne is a wanker’ (even if I might agree with them on this), it seemed a bit scary. But I’m starting to think that this is exactly the situation we’re in. ‘I’m a free Briton’ (or whatever). ‘I can spout any nonsense I like.’

I imagine that more worldly people than I have been aware of this for years. The whole political propaganda industry, after all, must be predicated on it, or at least allow for it. It’s dangerous for politicians openly to belittle the rationality of their electorate, for fear of being dismissed as elitists or snobs. The question is, whether they exploit the ignorance (like Trump, though he may well believe what he spouts), or try to combat it, or at least to divert it into more sensible paths. And then, of course, my pimply adolescents may be more of a minority than they appear btl. In which case we can all relax.

Perhaps the btl phenomenon has simply revealed what has always been there, under the surface, in which case it could be said to be performing a valuable service in shaking us naïfs out of our illusions. On the other hand I wonder whether it doesn’t also partly create the problem, in two ways. One is that it gives people the idea that it’s OK to express their views in print, on anything at all, whether they have any special knowledge of the area or not. As an author, essayist, reviewer and occasional blogger, I’ve made it a rule not to comment publicly – even btl – on anything I don’t have a particular expertise in, which would enable me, therefore, to contribute. This blog may be the first time I’ve broken this rule; except that of course I do have some close knowledge of btl, having been ignorantly traduced there a number of times. (One comment on the LRB blog thought I was a BNP supporter; a more recent Guardian one surmised that I must be a physical ‘coward’. Well, I may be: I hope not but I’ve not yet had my courage tested under fire; but there was no way he or she could have inferred that from the article they were commenting on.) That’s not the reason for my discontent, however. (Whoever reads these comments? I don’t, any longer.) The main one is the stupidity and ignorance displayed in so many of them, which offends against my rational delusions, or what Graham Wallas long ago called (in Human Nature in Politics, 1908) the ‘intellectualist assumption’ of people like me. And that’s because they’re encouraged, by the opportunity btl gives them, to think that their views are worth anything.

The other contribution of blogsites to this trait is that they seek these opinions instantaneously, and allow them to be offered anonymously. ‘Instantaneous’ means that btl bloggers don’t have to give themselves time to think. Sometimes it appears that they don’t even give themselves time to read the articles they are commenting on. A single word near the beginning might set off a stream of prejudice. (That’s my experience, in the cases I cited.) Anonymity – or more accurately, pseudonymity, often under pen-names that themselves attest to their writers’ immaturity – means that they can’t be held to task for what they write. There may be excuses for anonymity in certain cases: for whistle-blowers, for example, or people fearing violence on account of their views. For most people, however, the only reason for using a pseudonym is to allow them to write any nonsense without comeback – except from other pseudonymous bloggers on the same site. But – to return to our stupid American radio show caller-in – as well as being ‘free’ to say what you want, you should be ‘responsible’ for it. The other way really is a ‘coward’s’ way; the equivalent of ‘anonymous letters’ in a past age, when they were always rightly despised. Why aren’t they any more?

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A final thought. It’s just as well my blog has scarcely any ‘followers’, or this post too might attract dozens of silly responses btl. As well of course as some intelligent and useful ones – not all bloggers are idiots; but I haven’t got time these days to separate these from the chaff.

It’s pretty obvious what’s going to come out of the negotiations Cameron is pursuing with our European partners just now (Friday afternoon), in the next few hours or days. Much of it is pure theatre. The negotiations are drawn out so that all sides can persuade their electorates of the difficulties of the task, and the lengths they are prepared to go in order to assure their nations’ interests. Then at a minute to midnight – or later – they’ll announce a settlement, which all sides will parade as a hard-won victory. So far as Cameron is concerned, the gains he’ll have made will be very minor ones, but he’ll make the most of them, and enter the referendum debate on the ‘In’ side. Many of his own MPs – perhaps a third or more – will nonetheless vote for ‘Brexit’; but it won’t matter, because a large majority of the Labour Party and all the Scots Nats, certainly in Parliament, will vote ‘In’. That’s despite the nature of the concessions Cameron has won – neoliberal ones – which would not have been the ones Labour would have sought, but the very opposite. So far as they’re concerned, the EU will be a less comfortable fit now than if Cameron had never messed with it. Come the referendum, and partly because of the ‘fear’ factor – the unknown repercussions of Brexit – the ‘Yes’ side will win, by a small majority. Cameron will retire before the next general election, as he has already promised to do, his historical reputation, or ‘legacy’, having been established, as the man who saved both the Union (with Scotland) and Britain’s place in Europe. He may turn out to be the only British politician whose career – to quote Enoch Powell – has not ‘ended in failure’. He won’t deserve it.

That of course is to take no account of ‘events, dear chap’ (Macmillan); i.e. unexpected ones, which could change everything. If so, forget all this. If not, remember where you first read this prediction.

My latest Guardian review.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/19/heroic-failure-and-the-british-by-stephanie-barczewski-review

The numbers of beggars – usually Roma – in the Stockholm streets don’t seem to have diminished since Kajsa and I wrote our LRB Blog piece about them exactly a year ago: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/02/11/bernard-porter/on-stockholms-streets/. These are – I think – quite apart from the huge number of Middle Eastern refugees that Sweden has taken in, but housed in transition centres and camps in the countryside. Apparently the latter are now bursting the bounds of the facilities provided for them, provoking a rethink of Sweden’s ultra-generous asylum policy. That is understandable, and still leaves Sweden way above mean-minded Britain – let alone the eastern European nations – in the refugee morality scale. Obviously this is a problem that needs to be tackled Europe- or even world-wide, and would be if the EU lived up to its best ideals, of being more than merely a ‘common market’. (See below, 16 Feb.)

Many of these problems – excluding the many caused by wars and Islamic fanaticism – have their roots in the growing inequalities of the present day, remarked on by nearly everyone and highlighted by those on the Left; which in their turn are clearly (it seems to me) a function of unrestrained capitalism. I was struck by this report in today’s Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/18/san-francisco-technology-entrepreneur-bemoans-citys-homeless-riff-raff; a prosperous technology entrepreneur in San Francisco complaining that he has to pass by beggars – ‘riff-raff’ – on his way to work. Yes, he admits, rising house prices and gentrification are one cause of this, throwing the poor out of their homes; but still, ‘wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city.’ They ‘shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle and despair of homeless people.’ Poor rich diddums. After all – and this is the clincher – ‘the reality is we live in a free market society.’ Ah, yes. Not a human society, but a market one. That is ‘the reality’. It’s natural. I’m reminded of Dickens’s description of ‘Coketown’ in Hard Times (1852): human and social life determined, every hour of the day, by the iron discipline of the machine.

The other aspect of this report is what it tells us about the mindset of some of the rich in these circumstances, persuaded by their belief in the ‘naturalness’ of capitalism and its resultant inequality, to regard poverty as (a) inescapable, and (b) somehow the poor’s own fault. Owen Jones’s book Chavs is good on this, the demonization of the poor, to the extent even, of blaming them for the economic ills of society generally. Hence it’s the poor – not the bankers – who are supposed to bear the cost (‘austerity’) of the latest financial crash. I suppose that’s understandable, if you’re brought up to believe in the habitual fecklessness of the working classes.

How that bears on Stockholm’s ‘Roma problem’ I’m not sure. Obviously they’re not begging in the streets because of Swedish inequality. They were poor and discriminated against before they came. Maybe we can blame capitalism if we regard it as a global phenomenon. But there are, of course, many other villains of the piece. Race prejudice for a start; followed by religious prejudice, evil dictators, and war. More equality, however, both domestically and between nations, might help.

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ – For 168 years that has been the plaintive call from the little revolutionaries in the back of the socialist car as it meanders across the bewilderingly varied landscape of capitalism on its way to its glorious destination, which at times has seemed almost more distant than it did at the start of the journey. That is in spite of its ‘inevitability’, in Karl Marx’s ‘scientific’ view, as the ‘internal contradictions’ of capitalism worked to progressively destroy it from within.

There were glimpses of that along the way, but they always turned out to be mirages. Marx himself thought he espied it in Britain as early as 1848; but then capitalism recovered, in Victorian Britain’s so-called ‘golden years’. (They weren’t golden for everyone.) The ‘Great’ Depression of the 1870s-on inspired much revolutionary activity, but little came of it. Lenin blamed imperialism, which had delayed the inevitable ‘crisis of capitalism’ by off-loading its surplus products. Later, two world wars – themselves the product of imperialism – had the same effect. The first one appeared to ignite the fuse at last, in Russia in 1917; but that turned out to be premature. As Engels had been telling the Bolsheviks for years before, Russia wasn’t anything like ‘advanced’ enough along the capitalist road to create the proper ‘scientific’ conditions for socialism to emerge. What did emerge, therefore, was premature; which is why, perhaps, it could only be kept alive in a totalitarian incubator. Then revolution in the West appeared to be coming nearer again during the second, and far ‘Greater’, depression of the 1930s; only to be confronted by fascism – the other common reaction to economic deprivation – and then diverted by the Second World War, which cured under-consumption and soaked up the unemployed.

After that, the West played clever. The new tactic was to tame capitalism, making its impact just bearable enough to make it not worth rebelling against. Capitalists generally went along with that, because it gave them security, at least, if not the full range of ‘opportunity’ that unrestrained capitalism promised. The welfare state and economic regulation were the two main means to that end. When I was a young man in the Labour party, and studying political philosophy (as part of my History degree), I went along with most other democratic socialists in assuming that this had proved Marx wrong. Capitalism didn’t need to implode. Clever politicking could see it through the crises which, left to itself, would have inevitably destroyed it. (This is Keynes, of course.) That was a comfort, for none of us democratic socialists wanted to forgo all the benefits of economic competition, which were undeniable, least of all our consumer durables; or to risk going through what Russia and her satellites were going through just then, in order to rid ourselves of capitalism’s less salubrious – indeed, quite monstrous – aspects.

The Great Reaction of the late 1970s-onwards, of course, brought an end to that. Welfare and regulation were chipped away, leaving capitalism far redder in tooth and claw to roam the land again. After Thatcher, Blair and then Cameron built on that. (Blair had no idea.) The reasons for this counter-revolution are unclear. I’m personally reluctant to credit Reagan and Thatcher with any vital agency, still less the narrow-minded ideologues who gave them intellectual credibility. They were all riding a wave. That wave appears to be a ‘natural’ one, a historical imperative; a tendency in other words which is inherent in the capitalist system itself, especially when it is globalised, subjecting welfare states to ‘unfair’ competition from cheap overseas labour, tax havens, and the like. That seems – in the teeth of my young man’s optimism – to bear Marx’s predictions about capitalism out. That wasn’t a bad prediction, for 1848. It had just taken longer than he had hoped.

So far, then, so very Marxist. And so promising, surely, for the children in the back of the car, who may, if their grasp on grown-up theory is sound, espy their promised land ahead of them yet again. (Incidentally, Marx couldn’t tell us what that promised land would look like, exactly. We wouldn’t know until we got there. That’s part of his theory too – ‘base and superstructure’.) The question is, is capitalism now finally at the stage where it is about to collapse, to be supplanted by something?

The signs – for socialists – are mildly encouraging. The 2008 crash (which is still reverberating), and the quite obvious flimsiness of Britain’s and other European countries’ de-industrialised and finance-dependent economies; Occupy, Pickety, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, all those Continental ‘far left’ parties, anti-government (of all kinds) movements; the junior doctors’ strikes; protests over unemployment, the housing crisis and tax avoidance; the world-wide movement against ‘climate change’, which is essentially a protest against capitalist exploitation of the earth; even the Liverpool FC supporters’ rebellion against seat price hikes: all these may be straws in a much more violent coming wind. English professional football, incidentally, is a very good exemplar of what happens when international capitalists reduce a ‘people’s game’ to a market product. In this sense it could be said that the Liverpool fans’ protest is part of a wider anti-capitalist rebellion.

On the other hand, of course, there is the rise of right-wing movements, from nativist to quasi-fascist, which one should also expect at a time of economic crisis, especially if one knows one’s history, and which can attract, in a ‘false consciousness’ kind of way, much of the discontent that a failing capitalism is bound to provoke. Donald Trump seems to be the scariest of the Führer figures that this has thrown up, though his American brand of fascism might be more soft-ball and apple-pie; the amusing Farage probably less so. It should not be assumed, by the way, that the followers of either of these demagogues are necessarily as right-wing as they. Trump and UKIP both address working- and middle-class concerns that could equally be milked by a more convincing – and leftish – Left. Indeed, recent local by-election results in England may bear this out, with Ukippers apparently deserting in droves to Corbyn’s Labour Party. Is the same conceivable in the USA – Trumpers switching to Bernie? Probably not.

We need to remember, too, that the global market, and its political agents, still exert great power, and are prepared to exert it unscrupulously. One small British example is the way the Tories are almost blatantly gerrymandering the electoral system – already ludicrously undemocratic: where else would a party representing only 25% of the electorate be given an absolute majority of seats in the legislature? and that’s without taking account of party funding, and the influence of the ‘right-wing press’ – by disenfranchising over a million mainly Labour voters, and various other subterfuges. And they’re not finished yet. They have billions of dollars – literally – behind them; and the powerful incentive of their own greed.

So, sit back, kids, and play with your consumerist toys – the Barbie doll, the iPad, and all the rest. We may have some way to go yet.

No complaints; I really don’t feel sore about this, just slightly perplexed. But I’m wondering why (virtually) no-one has yet reviewed my British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t? It came out in October. I can’t fault the publisher, who made a really good job of the book, and – so far as I can judge – of the publicity. Yet all I’ve had so far are: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/the-empire-strikes-back-british-colonialism-legacies, by Tristram Hunt, which blows hot and cold (fair enough); and http://defencereport.com/book-watch-british-imperial-what-the-empire-wasnt/, which is a real rave, but in an obscure internet journal.

Of course the book may not be very good, though obviously I think it is. It’s certainly an easy read, almost conversational in style. It’s intended for a general rather than a scholarly market. It has some good jokes. One problem may be that it doesn’t fit into either of the usual categories, for histories of the British Empire, of ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ – although I think it makes it plain how generally ‘anti’ I am. Instead it seeks to explain it, at what I think is a deeper and more subtle level, with some interesting new ideas; and to dispel some popular myths.

Perhaps people need their myths? Or perhaps my approach doesn’t make the book appear ‘sexy’ enough for reviews editors? Or as obviously controversial as, say, Niall Ferguson’s oeuvre? (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/25/civilization-west-rest-niall-ferguson-review). – And of course I’m not so well known outside academia as he is, or as Paxo: (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/05/empire-ruling-world-paxman-review.)

I’ve had flops before (Britannia’s Burden; Empire and Superempire; The Battle of the Styles), but also some widely and well reviewed successes. I think it must have something to do with the ways I pitch them. Or am I being impatient? Maybe the reviews will come later; and maybe I’ll wish they hadn’t, if they’re hostile.

In the meantime, here’s the Amazon link. (Though there’s not even an Amazon review!) http://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Imperial-What-Empire-Wasnt/dp/1784534455/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1455367777&sr=1-1&keywords=porter+british+imperial.

As I say, I’m not complaining about this. I don’t need and don’t think I necessarily deserve the accolades of the public, or even scholarly reviews to further my career. (Being retired, I have no ‘career’ left.) I’ll get very little money for it in any case. That’s not why authors like me write books. I would like the book read, and its ideas to seep into people’s understanding of British imperialism, simply because that understanding is currently – in my view – so distorted. That was my ‘mission’ from the start. But in the last resort, the ‘return’ an author gets from his or her books mainly lies in the sheer pleasure and intellectual challenge of writing them. I’d write even if I knew no-one was reading me. This blog is evidence of that.

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On another matter – the junior doctors’ dispute: can one impose a contract? Literally, I mean. Isn’t a contract an agreement between two or more parties?

(From the archive. This is a review I wrote of The Strange Case of Thomas Quick. The Swedish Serial Killer and the Psychoanalyst who created him by Dan Josefsson, for the Guardian a couple of months ago. It follows on from an earlier piece Kajsa and I posted, firstly on the LRB blog and then on this one: below, December 2013. That one went more into police and legal failures; this concentrates on the cod psychology at the centre of the affair.)

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Ah, Sweden! Lakes, forests and islands; glorious summers (and treble-glazing to take care of the winters); peace; prosperity; beautiful people; gender equality; fantastic parental leave and childcare provision; free university education; true Social Democracy; toleration; massive generosity towards refugees; IKEA… I’ve lived there for 20 years, on and off, and it is still, broadly speaking, my ‘Shining City on the Hill’.

But isn’t that a bit boring? Which is maybe why ‘Thomas Quick’ – a.k.a. Sture Bergwall, a minor criminal much troubled by his homosexual urges – caused such a vicarious thrill when he arrived on the Swedish public scene in November 1993, unmasked as Sweden’s first ‘serial killer’, with a career going back nearly thirty years, to when he was 14, and extending to 39 murders by the time they stopped counting. Most of them involved sexual gratification and ritual dismemberment, with a couple of cases of cannibalism thrown in. (His favourite titbits were nipples and sphlincters.) The tabloids were ecstatic. It made a welcome change from new traffic plans for Stockholm and the love life of the generally well-behaved Crown Princess Victoria. This was ‘Nordic Noir’ with a vengeance. But in this case the press was hardly to blame. The ‘serial killer’ story was corroborated by the police, leading psychiatrists, the judiciary – which convicted him of eight of the murders – and by Quick himself. In fact, Quick was its sole original source. He ‘confessed’ to all these murders before anyone had suspected him of any of them. No other evidence was ever produced for his complicity; not even ‘information that only the killer could have known.’ That was usually found to have been gleaned from heavy hints by his interrogators, or from his own researches among old provincial newspapers in the Stockholm City library. (Who would have thought that a member of the criminal classes could use a microfilm reader?) When he was taken to where he claimed to have buried the bodies, together with trained ‘cadaver dogs’, not a shred was found. (One bit of ‘bone’ turned out later to be chipboard.) Without the police leading him on, his descriptions – of murder sites, the appearances of his victims, and the methods and weapons he had used – were nearly always wrong. In fact, of course, he hadn’t murdered anyone. Reading this account it seems inexplicable that anyone could have thought he did. That, of course, is the tabloid story now.

Josefsson’s isn’t the first book-length account of it, even in English translation. The late Hannes Råstam’s Thomas Quick: the Making of a Serial Killer (2012) was the best of the earlier ones. Råstam was the heroic journalist who started all this off. He laid the blame at the doors of the three agencies involved, roughly equally. The police were simply stupid. (Råstam points out hat they also lied.) The courts – not as democratic as ours, though that might not have made a difference – were totally incapable of dealing properly with cases in which even the defence counsel argued for his client’s guilt, because that’s how Quick instructed him; and then were too rigid to change their minds when the cases fell apart. The psychiatrists who were in charge of Quick were slaves of a particular theory which led them to assume, and then to argue in court on what were supposed to be ‘scientific’ grounds, that Quick had to be guilty, and indeed was more likely to be guilty the more mistakes he made. (The mistakes were a way of approaching the truth.) Josefsson mainly runs with that last idea. Indeed, his book – brilliantly researched, angry, immensely readable in this fine translation – is at least as much about one particular psychiatrist, whom he sees as the real villain here, as it is about Quick.

Her name was Margit Norell, and it was her theory of repressed childhood memory that fuelled the case against Quick. He had been, she claimed, sexually abused by his parents as a young child – a fact that only emerged, and in a grotesque form (this book is not for the squeamish), after weeks of psychotherapy, and under a mixed regime of powerful prescription drugs – which is what set off his own killing spree. His six siblings vigorously denied the abuse, but that just went to show how repressed their memories were. Nowadays ‘repressed memory’ is a contested idea, to be balanced against another notion, ‘false memory’, which may have been what the heavily-doped Quick was exhibiting, if he wasn’t consciously and cleverly making it all up. (From Josefsson’s account of his earlier life he seems quite capable of that.) But Norell’s diagnosis fitted better with the great theory she was hoping to make her name with, after years of perceived failure. She was hoping it would put her up there with Freud. Instead it not only brought down her own reputation, but also gravely damaged that of the whole psychiatric profession in Sweden, as well as, indirectly, of the law.

How on earth could one elderly psychiatrist have this influence? She wasn’t actually employed by Säter hospital, where Quick received most of his treatment, but only acted as an external ‘supervisor’ for his appointed psychotherapists. All of them, however, had been her pupils or disciples in the past; many of them had even been her patients. She obviously exerted a tremendous personal magnetism over them, despite what appears to be a haughty way with them (she was quite upper-class), and a streak of cruelty if she was ever crossed. Many of them, interviewed later by Josefsson, described her as a ‘mother’ figure: often a replacement for the mothers they felt they had never had. They also commonly characterized the group of them together as a ‘sect’ or even a ‘cult’, adhering to a rigid set of beliefs, about repressed memories and how to unrepress them, against what increasingly came to be the scepticism of the rest of the psychiatric world. More than this: Josefsson has discovered, surprisingly, that many of the police and judiciary involved in the Quick cases were also personally under her influence, sometimes, again, as ex-patients of hers. So it was a closed circle, each element reinforcing the others.

It also operated in a particular context of ‘progressive’ thinking about society generally, especially on the Left, going back to the revolutionary 1970s, which welcomed the idea that even schizophrenia and criminal psychosis were environmental rather than biological, and could be cured, ‘naturally’, by means of therapy. Nearly all the people responsible for this miscarriage of justice were good Social Democrats, often distinguished for their liberalism in other fields. Claes Borgström, for example, Quick’s defence lawyer, became a respected Equality Ombudsman later on. That’s an unsettling thought, for us admirers of the Shining City.

It wasn’t a bad theory, if you treated it as a hypothesis. Hypotheses, however, need to be tested. Otherwise they’re not ‘theories’, which is how they are often described, but mere assumptions. Margit Norell’s fault – and it’s a huge one in a ‘scientist’ – was that she would not allow her followers to question her assumptions and methods in the slightest degree. In the Quick case, they ignored every indication that he might be taking them for a ride, preferring to fit awkward facts to the ‘theory’ in the most ludicrous ways. (His siblings’ ‘repressed memories’ are an example.) Police officers and lawyers were blinded by her ‘scientific’ reputation, and overwhelmed, perhaps, by her charisma.

Thomas Quick can hardly be blamed. He was a deeply disturbed and lonely individual, desperate to remain in Säter, rather than be sent to prison where he was sure he would be bullied, and loving the attention, sympathy and drugs he received from his therapists, especially as he ratcheted his murders up. In the end he has done us all a favour by revealing the damage that can be done by a rigid and closed legal system, too much respect for authority, poor police procedures, and ‘theories’ not backed up by empirical proof. Even in Sweden. The poor fellow always wanted to count for something. Now he does.

The Guardian today points the finger at Jack Straw as having been one of the least ‘open’ ministers – with regard to Freedom of Information – of his day: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/08/jack-straw-ministries-among-worst-freedom-of-information

In 1999 I wrote this piece about ‘official secrecy’ for the LRB, which features him towards the end, and his sharing an ‘old school’ with me. I thought his school experience might be relevant. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n14/bernard-porter/boarder-or-day-boy