Porter’s Pensées

I’ve never bought into the idea that Islam is a religion of peace and freedom which is being perverted by a few extremists. Here’s a comment I found on a Guardian blogsite this morning:

‘The problem is that many followers of Islam (the majority in fact according to many polls) believe that the Qur’an is the one and only interpretation of God’s will, and to suggest otherwise is blasphemy, punishable by death.

‘This seems pretty unambiguous:

‘Qur’an (33:57) – “Lo! those who malign Allah and His messenger, Allah hath cursed them in this world and the Hereafter, and hath prepared for them the doom of the disdained”

‘Qur’an (33:61) – [continues from above] “Accursed, they will be seized wherever found and slain with a (fierce) slaughter.”‘

‘Islam’ (continues the blogger) ‘needs a reformation of its holy text to remove such sentiments. Ironically, moderate imams and clerics who advocate change of it are gunned down/killed, whatever.’

Of course this applies, in varying degrees, to all ‘unreformed’ and dogmatic religions or ideologies; Catholic Christianity in the Middle Ages, for example; and Stalinist Communism in the 1930s and ’40s. It just so happens that it’s Islam (or lslamicism) that is the main offender today.

Or – rather – is the extreme dogmatism that young men (and a few women) who, for various reasons, WANT an extreme and violent dogmatism to identify with, go to today.

The February edition of History Today will carry an article by me on ‘Surveillance: a new British tradition’. It contrasts our acceptance of all kinds of government intrusion into our affairs today with Britain’s proud and national identity-defining anti-espionage tradition until recently. I wrote it some time ago, and it’s purely by chance that it will be appearing at a time when people may be more willing to accept domestic espionage, in the face of very real Islamist threats (Paris, 7 January). I think I’ve made it clear that I’m not necessarily advocating the same degree of ‘spylessness’ today, and I hope it won’t be taken that way. My main point is that ‘national identity’ can’t be founded on ‘history’, but is bound to change, with circumstances, through time.

The Palace of Westminster is crumbling. It will require £3 billion to restore it. I’ve never been very fond of the building architecturally, and it wasn’t popular when it was built – least of all among MPs, who complained of the stink it let in from the Thames – but familiarity often breeds acceptance, and the silhouette has become so iconic that of course the place needs to be put back into shape. Whether or not that’s worth splashing out three billion for, when there are so many other worthy causes to hand, such as bailing out banks, is for taxpayers – or rather the chancellor – to decide.

Another question is what to do with MPs while the job is being done. They could stay there, I suppose, while the work goes on around them; but anyone who’s had builders in will know the inconveniences of that. But isn’t there a golden opportunity here? The fabric of the palace isn’t the only thing that’s crumbling. The reputation of those who work in it is, too. That may have reached crisis point, with decreasing turnouts in successive elections and the current extraordinary success of an essentially anti-politics party. Ukip may have been founded on right-wing xenophobia, and be led by public school bankers, but it’s beginning to beat more populist, traditionally left-wing drums: against big business, NHS privatisation and the like. I don’t want to make too much of the analogy, but this is the way Nazism gained its mass support: nationalism plus ‘socialism’, against a background of widespread disillusion with ‘old’ politics.

Ukip is gentler than that, a soft-ball version of the fascist game. But a common factor, which it also shares with other new or growing parties in Europe – the Sverige Demokraterna, for example, or the Front National in France, or Italy’s Five Star Movement, together with the Tea Party in the United States – is its anti-establishment politics. In Britain it has been fed by the expenses and other scandals, various cover-ups (those ‘lost’ paedophile files), Parliament’s perceived powerlessness in the face of Brussels and big business, the rise of consumerism and press cynicism; but a powerful component is the idea that politicians no longer relate to the electorate. They’re not ‘ordinary people’ any more. Tories are all Bullingdon Boys (they aren’t, but that’s the image), and Labour MPs are professional politicians since their student union days, who have never done a proper job in their lives. (Except my local MP, the former postman Alan Johnson, who has ruled himself out for the Labour leadership; and Tristram Hunt, who has been a university lecturer. Yes, that is a proper job.) In a literal sense, most of them are no longer our representatives.

Aggravating this is their geographical distance from most people, in the bubble of privilege in the south-east of England known as London and the ‘home’ counties, with a totally different economic trajectory from the rest of the country – house prices are rising there, for example; they’re still stagnant here in Hull – and a general disdain for ‘provincials’. (I also realise that the south isn’t all soft: many areas of London, for example; the part of Essex where I grew up; towns like Rochester; the far south-west.) One way of dealing with this alienation might be to insist that prospective MPs have done a ‘proper job’ for at least ten years before offering themselves to the electorate. (I’d exclude ‘public relations’ from the list of acceptable jobs, but maybe that’s just me.)

Another, however, might be to take advantage of the Palace of Westminster’s imminent overhaul to evacuate it and move Parliament around, like the Cup Final while Wembley was being rebuilt. Peripatetic parliaments or king’s councils are not unprecedented. We had them in the early Middle Ages. Other countries still do. That way MPs could re-engage directly with the parts of Britain that feel distanced from Westminster today. Meeting one year in Manchester, the next in Glasgow (not Edinburgh, given the local competition), another in Swansea, then in Newcastle or even Hull (UK City of Culture in 2017), they would see the shuttered-up shops, the desolation caused by deindustrialisation, as well as the many positive and promising aspects of provincial life. And national journalists would follow them, and report. I’m sure they could find enough big rooms to meet and debate in – even some that might remind them of their old home, such as Manchester Town Hall (a much better building than the Palace of Westminster). Getting away from London for a while could do Britain’s crumbling democracy a power of good. What’s to lose?

(Previously on the LRB Blog, 25 November 2014.)

No belief that can’t be insulted is worthy of respect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Previously posted on the LRB Blog.)

The Assange affair rumbles on. Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy, at a cost of God knows how much to the taxpayers of Ecuador, and more to those of the UK, to pay for the police stationed around it ready to whisk him away to Sweden if he ventures outside. The situation must be an embarrassment all round; not least to the British and Swedish governments, which have both shown signs recently of realizing how ridiculous the whole situation is. I’ll come on to that at the end of this piece. In the meantime it may be worth recapitulating on events so far. Assange doesn’t any longer surface much in either the British or the Swedish press – I’ll touch on that at the end, too; and I have reason to think – from comments on a piece I posted recently on the London Review of Books site – that many people who ought to know about it don’t, or have forgotten. So here is a run-down of the salient features of his case; the case of his attempted extradition, that is, rather than of Wikileaks more generally.

Assange was in Stockholm early in 2010 to talk about Wikileaks, when he lodged with a female admirer, and – consensually (there’s no doubt about that) – had sex with her. He also had sex with another admirer shortly afterwards. The first groupie was annoyed by this, which may (only may) partly explain what followed. Groupie no.1 was worried by the fact that their sex had been unprotected, and by his reluctance to have an AIDS test afterwards. So she went along to the local police in order to ascertain whether he could be forced to have the test. Somehow that mushroomed into an accusation of ‘rape’ against Assange, which groupie no. 1 persuaded groupie no. 2 to go along with. Assange consented to be interviewed by the police in connection with that, after which they decided there was no convincing case against him, and let him go to Britain, which was the next place on his schedule. So far so good. Assange is obviously what we oldies used to regard as ‘a bit of a cad’ in his personal life, but probably no more. If we made a habit of extraditing cads, we wouldn’t have many of our young male upper classes left. Alarm over.

Then, however, Marianne Ny stepped in. She’s a prosecutor (not a judge) in Gothenburg, over on the other side of Sweden, who is well known for championing ‘women’s causes’, and for recommending that even tentatively suspected sex offenders should be immediately incarcerated: viz.:

‘only when the man is arrested and the woman is left in peace does she have time to get some perspective on her life, and then get a chance to discover how she really has been treated.’

Apparently Ny decided off her own bat that Assange’s case needed to be reopened, and to apply under the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) to get him extradited immediately. Why her mere say-so sufficed to set this in motion is a mystery to many of us, but apparently was enough to persuade the British court that heard his appeal to let it go forward. In the end Ny’s accreditation was the only point at issue; not the flimsiness of the evidence against Assange, which was apparently immaterial at that stage. That’s what the Appeal judge said. He was bound by the EAW.

I have to say was taken aback by this. It was Assange’s case that first drew my attention to the EAW, which had entirely passed under my radar when it was originally incorporated into British law in 2003, when David Blunkett was Home Secretary. I wasn’t paying attention. I know something of the history of British extradition law before then. It had always been hedged around with certain safeguards: suspects could only be extradited to countries whose legal systems we trusted; if they were formally charged with offences that were offences in Britain too, and explicitly not for ‘political’ offences; if a British court thought, from the evidence, that there was a good prima facie case against them; and with the assurance that, once extradited, they could not be charged with or re-extradited for any other offence. That last was very important, and was intended to prevent obvious abuses, like using the original extradition request as a mere pretext. Now all that has gone. The overt motive for this was to facilitate bringing terrorists and mobsters to justice – it was all part of that ‘War on Terror’ nonsense after 9/11; another might have been to cuddle up to Europe, even if it meant sacrificing fundamental ‘British liberties’. Whatever; hundreds of people have been removed from Britain under the terms of the EAW over the last ten years, many of them entirely and indeed obviously innocent. Assange was one of them; or would have been, if he hadn’t sought asylum in Ecuadorian national territory before they could get at him.

He wouldn’t have needed to do that if Ny had met two simple conditions: that she question him in London (or by Skype), as is very common in these trans-national cases (there’s a European mechanism for it); and that the Swedish state, or courts, or whoever has the ultimate say in this, promises not to extradite him on to the USA. That of course is why he wasn’t willing to go back to Sweden voluntarily to ‘face the music’. He has always protested his innocence. Sweden – especially the last centre-right coalition government – is more hand-in-glove with the Americans than it likes its people to think. That was something, incidentally, that one of the earliest ‘Wikileaks’ revealed (it was to do with ‘rendition’). The USA certainly wants to extradite him for his Wikileaks ‘offences’, in order to try him on political charges that could land him in an awful American prison for decades. (If he is to go to prison, he’d do much better in a Swedish one; they’re pretty comfortable – which is probably why Sweden has a lower rate of recidivism.) Sweden has so far refused to rule this out. No-one can understand why both these conditions have not been met.

Which of course makes the whole thing look suspicious. The obvious peculiarities of this case are such that its manipulation by the Americans, in league with the Swedish Moderaten Party (recently advised, for example, by Karl Rove of all people) – in other words, a ‘conspiracy’ – begins to seem the most credible of all possible options. I doubt whether Ny is part of this; she has enough ultra-feminist motivation of her own. Maybe the conspirators were just lucky to have her on hand; and that Assange’s alleged offences were the most likely to prejudice ‘progressive’ Swedes against him, whatever they might think of Wikileaks. The soil was well-tilled for a Swedish-British-American plot against him, if that’s what it was. The idea of his being flown over to the USA, after or even before a Swedish trial on the (mooted) ‘sex’ charges, may be on balance unlikely, but is not out of the question. If I were Assange, even if I were confident of being able to exonerate myself in a Swedish court, I would be afraid, too.

I’m also less confident than I used to be of his getting a fair trial in Sweden. This has surprised me, sharing as I do the common view (certainly on the Left) of Sweden as a progressive and liberal-socialist utopia, a model for us all. I still think it’s that in many respects, including most of its laws. But not its legal processes. I’ve learned a lot about those since the Assange case came up. So have many Swedes, who seem generally much more ignorant of their legal system than we are of ours, simply because they don’t participate in it. That’s because Sweden doesn’t have juries. Cases are tried by a judge flanked by two political appointees. (I’ve actually witnessed this.) Defendants are locked up pre-trial for months in isolation, and rarely granted bail. There have been cases where this has led to suicide. They often aren’t given full details of the charges against them until the last moment; this is happening to Assange too. I’m not sure that innocence is always presumed. The Swedes have a rather rigid, pedantic view of the law, which means that clearly innocent people can be convicted, and their convictions upheld on appeal, if it can be shown that the legal processes have been followed correctly. (This happened in the recent notorious case of Thomas Quick – a convicted ‘serial killer’ who turned out not to be. Never mind; if the trial was conducted by the book, he must have been.) The Swedish police are pretty dodgy, too; look at the mess they made over the murder of Olof Palme. (Don’t go by Kurt Wallander.) As well as this, the police, press and politicians seem to be allowed to prejudice trials in advance. Again, Assange is an example: prime minister Fredrick Reinfeldt made a public statement in February 2011 declaring Assange guilty; in Britain couldn’t that have led to Reinfeldt’s being imprisoned for contempt of court? He also claimed that our – British – problem was that we didn’t take rape seriously. That’s not going to help, in any Swedish trial of Assange.

I’ve no idea what Assange and his legal team think of all this. Obviously it wouldn’t be a particularly bright idea if, before a possible trial in Sweden, they started trashing its system. For all they and I know that system might have advantages over ours – be more efficient, more consistent, less vulnerable to popular (jury) prejudice. For somebody brought up in the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, however, it must seem unnerving to have to go to trial without the protection of twelve of your ‘peers’, under a system that goes back in Britain for centuries, and indeed formed the historical foundation of our sort of ‘democracy’. A judge flanked by placemen: to us that appears almost to encourage corruption and tyranny. We fought a civil war against this sort of thing. Reasonable or not, this is a cultural matter, a deeply-ingrained distinction between Britain and the Continent. Again, if the Australian Assange felt uncomfortable with the Swedish system, I wouldn’t blame him. I hope I never cross it when I’m there. But of course we’re not supposed to say that of a respected fellow- member of the EU.

If Assange were returned to Sweden, after being questioned in the Ecuadorian embassy, and with the assurance that the Americans wouldn’t be allowed to get him, one would have thought, from the evidence made public so far, that any case against him would be pretty easily countered. The women were not forced into anything. They even boasted of their ‘conquests’. Groupie no. 2 seems to have been a reluctant complainant in any case. The case mainly rests on a condom that Assange is said to have ripped deliberately: but then when the woman ‘produced’ it for the police, neatly cut, it turned out to have no traces of anyone’s DNA. The other charge is that Assange, already in bed with groupie no. 1, and after one bout of sex, asked her for another go while she was ‘half asleep’. I wonder how many of us, women as well as men, have been guilty of that? And remember it’s only their words against his. Could a case for ‘rape’ be made out of this? Clearly not in Britain. But then we don’t take rape seriously, according to Reinfeldt. In Sweden they are far more advanced, or crazy, if you like (it’s up to you), and have already assumed Assange is a rapist. That overrides everything: both the Wikileaks and the extradition issues. A pity; because if they could break free from this, they might come to understand more about their own legal shortcomings, and their government’s true relations with America. On this last – the ‘conspiracy theory’ – I’ll leave readers to judge.

Whatever the truth of that may be, it’s pretty much submerged now as a public topic. Swedish newspapers scarcely ever mention anything to do with Assange now; it all seems too indelicate. British papers seem to find him almost as embarrassing. Some of them have done hatchet-jobs on just about everything about him, ranging from his alleged ‘treason’ to his personal hygiene; culminating in Andrew O’Hagan’s long demolition of his character in a recent London Review of Books, after failing to establish a rapport with him as his ghost writer. I had the curious experience recently of being ‘pre-moderated’ (that is, blacklisted) from the Guardian’s website for wanting to mention his name in connection with the European Arrest Warrant. I still am. Assange has had his spats with the Guardian, of course. I doubt if there’s anything sinister behind these, but you never know. But it makes it difficult to discuss the Assange extradition case outside the (non- Guardian) blogosphere.

In a recent Commons debate on the EAW (the one the government at first tried to avoid) no-one brought up his case. Why not? You can understand why governments – any governments – and their stooges might want him buried. But what about the others? Could it be the ‘sex’ thing again? Is it impossible for a cad to be a hero any more? Have we progressed that far from James Bond?

But it could all change soon. During the eventual Commons debate on the EAW, Home Secretary Theresa May made it clear that the criteria for Britain’s abiding by it had changed, so that much stricter criteria would be followed in the future. Formal charges would need to be laid against suspects, for example, not just accusations by prosecutors; and the British courts would expect to be allowed to judge the prima facie quality of the evidence. If these standards had been in place in 2010, there is little doubt that Assange could not have been extradited then; or at least, not under the terms of the EAW. (There are other, slower and more scrupulous extradition procedures available.) On the other side of the North Sea, an appeal court in Sweden recently dismissed a motion to have the EAW withdrawn in Assange’s case, for the usual pedantic reason that it hadn’t been technically wrong; but on the other hand strongly criticised Marianne Ny for refusing to question Assange in England. An under-secretary at the British Foreign Office, Hugo Swire, has stated that he would ‘actively welcome’ and ‘do everything to facilitate’ that. Apparently it’s still up to Ny. (Yes, her alone.) She’s said to be thinking about it.

First published in Lobster magazine a couple of weeks ago.

I understand that I have some new subscribers, even though I haven’t contributed to this blogsite for a year. So I’ll add some posts shortly – mainly things I’ve written for other blogs or newspapers.

As a principled anti-nationalist, I hope Scotland doesn’t vote for independence, and stays with us English. If I were a Scot, however, I might feel otherwise. The Scottish political discourse really is very different from the Southern English – more social-democratic – which explains much of the Scots’ feeling of alienation from the Eton-Bullingdon-Buckinghamshire set that are governing us today. That’s another reason why I hope they stay with us; without them there would be a perpetual Tory (or UKIP) majority in England, leading to even more horrors than we are suffering now. 

I see, however, that some Scottish nationalists are fishing for a new union with the Scandinavian countries, whose social politics are really very much closer to the Scots’. There are other links too: lochs (fjords), a liking for strong liquor, and the fact that Scotland was actually a part of (Viking) Denmark for (?) 200 years. Much of this however applies to my part of England – the North – too. Most of that was part of the ‘Danelaw’. Many place-names around me are Nordic. And the real gulf between the two Britains today – widening and deepening year by year, a survey tells us today – comes not at the River Tweed, let alone Hadrian’s wall (at present all in England), but at the Humber-Mersey. If Scotland does break away and join Scandinavia, can it take us with it too?

In the Guardian today there’s a long piece by Michael Booth on Scandinavia, based on his new book, about which I blogged here when I received it for review in December. Here is my finished review, coming out in the Literary Review soon. I now think I should have been tougher on him. His description (in the Guardian) of the Systembolaget (quoting Susan Sontag) as ‘part funeral parlour, part back-room abortionist’ is a cheap travesty. They are wonderful places, bright, full of dependable wines – none of the rubbish you can get in our free-market wine stores – and staffed by helpful and knowledgeable people. Anyhow, here’s my review.

The Almost Nearly Perfect People. The Truth about the Nordic Miracle; by Michael Booth (Jonathan Cape, 395 pp., £14.99)

Scandinavia, or the Nordic countries if you want to include all five of them, does seem a bit of a marvel. To Labour supporters of my generation it was our ‘shining city on the hill’: an example of what democratic socialism could be like, without lapsing into Soviet tyranny. By the political Right it was either regarded as an embarrassment, suggesting that there was in fact ‘an alternative’ to liberal capitalism – remember Margaret Thatcher’s ‘TINA’?; or else dismissed as an illusion, a city built on sand, which would be bound to topple soon, and was probably less shining even then than it was presented. (Surely people must be groaning under all that taxation?) I feared at first that this book might be a sop to the latter group: ‘the truth about…’ (in the subtitle) seemed ominous; but I needn’t have worried over-much. Michael Booth has some conventional right-of-centre views about the Nordic welfare model: its unsustainability, its stifling impact on work and enterprise, its uniformity, its sheer dullness, as he sees it; but in the end his conclusion is that, for those ‘looking for an alternative to the rampant capitalism that has ravaged our economies’ in recent years, ‘the Nordic countries have the answer’. Which comes as a bit of a surprise after the strong criticisms of all of them expressed in the rest of the book. The Danish chapters are really quite excoriating; which puzzled me as to why the original Danish edition of the book, as its publisher tells us, got five-star reviews – until I reached the chapters on Sweden, which are even less complimentary. The Danes will accept any amount of punishment, it seems, if you beat the Swedes harder.

Booth starts with Denmark because he lives there, with a Danish wife and children at Danish schools. That, I suggest, gives him an insight into that country that doesn’t quite extend to the others, which he has merely visited and researched, and after Denmark, which has inevitably coloured his views of all of them. (I would do the same. I live in Sweden; when I visit the other Nordic countries I see them through Swedish, and behind that British, eyes.) He is at pains to point out how different they all are, and how scathing of the others. That’s true. You should hear my partner on the Danes (jokingly)! She’s going to love some of the ammunition provided here. Can it really be true that ‘seven per cent of Danish men have had sex with an animal’? (Not the same one, surely.) One of the major problems with this book is that it provides no sources or references, so we can’t rely on it. Much of it is impressionistic, and I have to say that many of its impressions of the Swedes don’t accord with mine. On the other hand, Booth is absolutely right to be angry about Sweden’s record in World War II, which ought to be a source of shame to Swedes still, but which most of them seem blithely unaware of. This may be one of the things that fuels the arrogance that their neighbours detect in them. In Finland, apparently, which Sweden refused to help in its ‘winter war’ against the Soviets, it is also seen as evidence of Swedish men’s ‘gayness’. That and the hairnets that were ordered for the Swedish military in the 1960s, when long hair was fashionable. (Booth is good on Finnish ‘macho’ culture.)

It was Sweden’s ‘neutrality’ during the war which laid the base for her economic prosperity afterwards, though most Swedes themselves – and their British admirers – prefer to attribute it to their ‘consensual’ political and economic model. That, and their social egalitarianism, especially with regard to the sexes, is something that all the Nordic countries share. Even in ‘macho’ Finland, with its ‘wife-carrying competitions’ and the rest, half its politicians are women, 60% of its graduates, and a large proportion of its CEOs. At the root of this undoubtedly lies Scandinavia’s generous parental leave and child-care systems, which enable parental tasks to be shared, and consequently women to be liberated to fulfill themselves in other ways if they want. (Booth worries about the ‘feminist’ pressures on them to go out to work even if they would prefer not to.) The trade unions are powerful, but also co-operative with the owners, which was, of course, what Harold Wilson’s government saw as the solution to Britain’s economic ills, until his unions scuppered it. Michael Booth spends a lot of time trying to get to the bottom of this ‘consensus’ culture in Scandinavia, with a number of ingenious theories, most of them historical: the Viking inheritance, ethnic homogeneity (until recently), the lack of a proper feudal system in the middle ages, Denmark’s reduction from a great power to the rump of a nation by the nineteenth century, and so on. My Scandinavian friends, on the other hand, think this is a ‘natural’ state of affairs. They would turn the question around: why are the Anglo-Saxon nations so competitive? (It took a long time for my partner to come round to the view that the Swedish way wasn’t the default position for any society.)

All travel books, or books about foreign countries, say at least as much about where their authors are coming from as about where they are going. Of course this doesn’t make them any the less valuable, even to the peoples they are describing: ‘O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us’. The Almost Nearly Perfect People must tell the Scandinavians a lot about themselves that they might not have noticed, because they haven’t been asking Booth’s question; and will serve as a stimulating introduction to the region for foreigners. If its general bias is obvious, and a bit Anglo-Saxon, it also rehearses the arguments against it, usually from academics he has interviewed in the Nordic countries, very fairly. It covers most of the topics you would expect it to, including Sweden’s political assassinations, the Icelandic banking collapse, Utøya, the Mohammed cartoons, immigration, and the Far Right. It is weak on culture; but then Booth thinks the welfare state is detrimental to high art. (He admits to one of his interviewees that this makes him a ‘typical British snob’.) It is also a thoroughly entertaining read, written brilliantly, and with a number of good jokes. Maybe that’s why the Danes liked it so much. They have a more robust sense of humour than the other Nordics.

I’m still trying to work out why the British seem so much less worked up about the Snowden revelations than other peoples. In the old East Germany last summer, for example, I witnessed public demonstrations in support of him. Angela Merkel has spoken strongly against secret US surveillance of her; other European and Latin American leaders have joined in. In the USA public concern has resulted in a wholesale reform of surveillance practices, at least cosmetically. (That surely should be enough to justify Snowden’s ‘treason’. It implicitly acknowledges that he was right) In Britain, however, it seems only to be the Guardian, some bloggers, and a few MPs. Ministers are totally relaxed. William Hague’s comment originally was that ‘if you are a law-abiding citizen of this country going about your business and your personal life you have nothing to fear about the British state or the intelligence services listening to your phone calls or anything like that.’ Didn’t Goebbels say something similar? Simon Jenkins has called it ‘the motto of police states down the ages.’ Yet the Brits simply shrug, and get back to their more immediate worries; which are, of course, legion.

My surprise at this may be naïve. As a historian I know that opposition to domestic ‘espionage’ of almost any description was almost universal in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, and indeed a matter of great pride to most Britons, for whom it was thought to distinguish them from nastier foreign regimes like the Russian and the French. The word ‘espionage’ was even pronounced in a French way. ‘Spylessness’ was one of the traditions that defined their ‘national identity’. (Conservative education ministers seeking to use the study of history to inculcate ‘patriotism’ today might take note.) Of course it wasn’t absolute, and you can find precedents for state espionage going right back; but precedents don’t become a ‘tradition’ unless they are joined up, and the occasional uses of spies in and by Britain were not. They were pretty rare, usually harmless, provoked public outrage if they were ever discovered, and were for that reason always hidden from public gaze. I could give countless examples of this prejudice. My particular favourite is the Metropolitan police sergeant in the 1850s who was demoted for sneakily hiding behind a tree to witness an ‘indecent offence’; others are cited in an old book of mine, Plots and Paranoia (1989). So the present-day apathy seems out of historical character. But then of course it isn’t really our history that defines or ‘identifies’ us. That really is a naïve view.

Continental Europe and South America don’t have this ‘tradition’, of course. What they do have, however, is recent experience of state surveillance, and what it can lead to. The Stasi Museum in Leipzig exemplifies this chillingly, and must – together with their Nazi history – explain why Germans are more sensitive to this. (Merkel, of course, comes from the old East Germany.) Our own experience is less obviously cautionary. The Special Branch and MI5 have some skeletons in their cupboards, mainly to do with their manipulation by the political Right, usually directed against Labour governments; but much of that – as well as of many other British historical naughties – is still kept secret (some of it in the only recently discovered cache at Hanslope Park). [Guardian 18 Oct 2013.] Those things usually only get revealed when states – like the DDR – fall. So we are largely unaware.

Another possible explanation is that we are all still in thrall to our upper classes, who never shared the national liberal prejudice against ‘espionage’ to the same extent, if it was done against foreigners and plebs. One interesting sociological fact about the British secret services is that they were invariably headed by pretty posh people, most of whom, at least early on, were recruited either from the military, or from Britain’s colonial service, whose value-systems were forged in different environments. They also never quite trusted democracy, which is why they have been so resistant to effective democratic accountability for their spooks. Then of course there’s the impact of Irish and Islamist terrorism; though it has to be said that there was terrorism in nineteenth century Britain too – though obviously not on the scale of 9/11 – which doesn’t seem to have had this effect then.

But still, the lack of a public outcry does appear anomalous to a historian; and makes me wonder whether it might not be rooted in a fundamental national change when it comes to attitudes to ‘secrecy’. Today we seem quite relaxed about surveillance cameras in every street, Google’s satellite mapping, the use of ATM and shop receipts to track our movements, Amazon nosing in on our tastes in books and music: practices that would have been regarded with horror a century ago. More than that: thousands of people (and they can’t all be pimply adolescents) seem to enjoy secrecy, or pseudonymity, if it gives them the liberty to write rubbish comments on blogs, or abuse and threaten women and young people through Twitter. Again, ‘anonymous letters’ were once regarded as cowardly. Now they are widely accepted. How we’ve changed.

Another relatively un-concerned country appears to be Sweden, where I have my second home. That may be because they’re used to an intrusive State, and because of powerful hidden links they’ve long had with the Americans. I read recently that the Davos people have put their ex-prime minister Karl Bildt in charge of an inquiry into all this. That doesn’t fill me with confidence. You might as well appoint William Hague.