Porter’s Pensées

Of course there have been periods in the past when everything seemed to be getting terrifyingly worse – one thinks of the times before each of the two World Wars, or the Cuban missile crisis – but the present day must be one of the scariest. Autocracy and illiberalism are gaining ground in the world; crude nationalism is resurgent; Russia invades an independent country; there are massacres in the Sudan; and even Israeli Jews – up until now history’s quintessential victims – are ditching what must be regarded as the best aspects of their religion (which could be the Jewish cult that became Christianity, cleansed of its Pauline addenda), and are now behaving as a colonialist power of the cruellest kind. On a more parochial (British) level, we have the ‘nasty’ party in our politics becoming even nastier, whatever the result of its imminent leadership election, and being pushed to further nastiness by a new proto-Fascist party on its Right. That’s after having so screwed things up in its last fourteen years in office that it’s difficult to see how the country can return to decency. And then of course there’s still our criminal Fourth Estate.

On the domestic front Corbyn had some of the answers; and also a larger popular vote. But he also, of course, had that awful Press to contend with; and I’m not sure that his pacifism would have helped him today re. Gaza, Lebanon and the Ukraine.

In those earlier periods of doom and despondency, at least there were glimmerings of hope. (See my Britain Before Brexit, 2021, ch. 11.) Not so much now.

Robert Jenrick is a monster; a smooth-faced one, but no less monstrous for that. His notorious banning of cartoon figures painted on the walls of a reception centre for unaccompanied child immigrants, because they seemed too ‘welcoming’, will surely repel any decent human being – among whom there must be some Conservatives. He also wants Britain to withdraw immediately from the ECHR, which was his particular bête noir as Immigration Minister; has claimed (approvingly) that British forces kill rather than arrest enemies in order to prevent their being examined under ECHR rules; and has recently revealed himself as a champion of Donald Trump. How much lower could he get?

Well, quite a bit lower, if the rumour surrounding him currently is true. That is, that he has vouchsafed to the Left of his party (such as it is) that he would ‘pivot back to the centre’ if elected Leader, in order to get their support. He’s denied it. (See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/11/robert-jenrick-denies-he-would-drop-hard-right-policies-if-he-became-tory-leader.) But it still leaves a doubt; and if true would confirm the suspicion that he is only adopting these far-Right policies for tactical reasons – in order to spike the ‘Reform’ party – and not out of genuine conviction. Which in my book would make him even more of a villain; and would also place him in the company of all those other Tories (led of course by Boris) who regard politics as mainly a game.

Is Kemi Badenoch any better? Maybe decent Tory decent members should abstain in the vote, thus undermining the credibility of whichever of them wins.

(‘AbsentMindedCriticofEmpire’, incidentally, is good and right on Jenrick, in his comment on my last post.)

So, the Tories’ choice for leader lies between two Right-wing (even by Conservative standards) candidates: anti-EU, anti-human rights legislation, anti-welfare, very anti-immigration, and anti-what they call ‘woke’.

That one of these is a black woman should not give us (on the Left) any comfort. The Conservatives have a recent record of appointing brown people to top posts in their party and in government – the eliminated and marginally more liberal candidate James Cleverly is another example – which says much for their open-mindedness on questions of ‘race’; just as their choice of Margaret Thatcher as leader 46 years ago indicates that they may not have been quite as sexist as they had often appeared.

But that is to misunderstand the importance of race (or gender) in British politics – and perhaps British life generally – in recent years. I’ve always thought that these two factors, especially the first, were exaggerated, by those who wished to portray Britain as an eternally racist society, either arising out of or contributing to her imperial experience; despite some indications to the contrary. So far as the Conservative party is concerned, ‘identity’ has always been rooted more in values than in ethnicity: values that were sometimes portrayed as ‘national’, but were in fact essentially class-based. So, Kemi Badenoch is accepted because of her entrepreneurial back history, just as those awful brown-skinned female politicians Priti Patel and Suella Braverman were; and on the other side, the new black Foreign Secretary David Lammy is welcomed for his typically ‘Labour’ background. Jews have also been accepted on both sides for similar reasons. ‘Race’ has little to do with it; so long as you can show that you have imbibed the dominant culture of whichever team it is you want to join.

Unless, that is,your race or gender makes you feel that you need to express that culture more openly and extremely than you would if you were white and male; simply in order to confirm your credentials. Which may have been a factor in Thatcher’s case (‘the only one in the Cabinet with balls’); and could be one today for Badenoch, Patel and Braverman. But to suggest this seems patronising. (What can I know about their psychologies?)

Still, and whatever their views, the prominence of these women and men in present-day British politics must be one in the eye for those who claim that ‘immigrants’ can never integrate. They can, and do, even if they don’t always integrate into the parts of British society – the particular British ‘cultures’ (there are of course many) – that we might prefer to see them in.

More generally, I’ve been struck by this recent speech by the socialist Prime Minister of Spain, going right against the xenophobic trend in Europe today, to laud the economic and – yes – cultural benefits of immigration into his country; with a view to easing migrants’ way into Spanish society. (See https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spains-sanchez-touts-benefits-migration-european-neighbours-tighten-borders-2024-10-09/.) I only wish that Starmer could do the same. Britain of course has taken in migrants for most of her history, and broadly welcomed them. In general they have enriched her culture and society, as much as Sanchez says they have in Spain’s case; and benefitted her economy. That’s another topic, perhaps for a future post. (But you could start by reading my The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics, 1979; and Britain’s Contested History: Lessons for Patriots, 2022.)

(Churchill’s phrase, of course, for his bouts of depression.) OK, I’m depressed. But just now that seems normal to me. In fact I can’t understand why anyone isn’t depressed these days. (That may just show how depressed I am.)

Here in the UK it surely shouldn’t be so. We’ve recently had what ought to have been an encouraging general election (for us Lefties), bucking what seemed to be a general European Right-wing trend at the time, and restoring the Labour party to government after fourteen and a half years. As a result there are some promising things on the political menu now, for us to dine on over the next five (or ten?) years.

But on the other hand, we’re all aware that Labour’s huge election victory was achieved on the back of a minority (just 33 per cent) of the popular vote, which nonetheless gave it 62 per cent majority in the House of Commons. That seems pretty flimsy, and so maybe not to be relied upon.

This could act to the detriment of Britain’s political system generally, further undermining the popular trust that the Tories had squandered so extraordinarily over the past five years: Brexit, Boris, Liz, ‘Partygate’ and all the rest. It certainly adds grist to the mill of Britain’s new main Right-wing party, ‘Reform’; which suffered more than most from Britain’s electoral system – 14% of the vote delivering minus one per cent of MPs – which will have exacerbated its burning resentment against the whole ‘democratic’ system. The Tories may be down and out for now; but that’s no guarantee that the Right won’t raise its bloody head again, via either Reform, if it lasts; or a ‘Reformed’  – in ‘Reform’s’ image – Conservative party. The present leadership contenders in the Tory party don’t seem to have a decent ‘one-nation’ and liberal candidate among them. And the global tendency just now – certainly in the USA and most of Europe – seems to favour what I would call at least ‘proto’ fascism.

That’s a description that could also be applied to the major tendencies and actors in the Middle East, Saharan Africa and central Asia; all of them terrifying to ‘woke’ liberal folk like me. Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine are of course our main worries; all with extreme nationalism – and even blatant neo-Fascism – playing a major part. Obviously from our tiny (British) islands we can do nothing about these international horrors, apart from – possibly – denying Netanyahu some arms.

But there’s danger at home too. Yesterday the head of MI5 warned us all of the ‘sustained mayhem’ that Putin was currently fostering, by cyber warfare, in Britain and other ‘western’ countries (see  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8e15yr1gwo); together with threats from Iran, and (and this is fairly new, coming from an intelligence boss: see my Plots and Paranoia, 1989), from the ‘extreme Right’.

These are terrible times. So I’m depressed. Why aren’t you?

Forget – if you can – the lies of the past dozen years or so; the gross incompetence; the sheer human stupidity, even, of those who were supposed to be looking after the people’s best interests, in those years of political mayhem, international crisis, and pandemic. What gets me – and what I think lies behind a lot of this – is the trivialisation of British politics that Boris Johnson personified, but which of course – as I know as a historian – went back some years before him. (Probably to the 1890s.)

So it wasn’t entirely new. The crucial difference now however is that that opinion-makers – especially the ‘tabloid’ newspapers (including now the Telegraph), and of course the ‘social media’ – have realised, embraced and exploited this trivialisation, for their own political or personal ends. Serious politics is marginalised; elections reduced to a popularity show, or just a ‘game’, in the other papers and on social media; and policies or serious argument are scarcely featured at all. Instead it’s Ed Milliband with his bacon butty; Boris with his ‘bendy bananas’ (which he claimed the EU were plotting to ban) and new European regulations for condoms (to cater for the less well-endowed Italians) – which steal the headlines, appealing as they do because they’re ‘fun’. (Both the latter claims of course were untrue.) It could be that it was jokes like these, and his general image of clownish bonhomie, that won Johnson the 2019 Election. That; and having a ‘serious’ candidate standing against him. Whatever you may think of Corbyn, at least his policies were thought-out.

Do the trivialisers realise what they’re doing? Or do they genuinely believe in the trivia they churned out? In Boris’s case, I get the impression that it didn’t much matter to him. It was all just part of the game of politics, bearing about as much relation to truth and reality as would a clever speech for the Eton College debating society. (Eton is almost the quintessence of upper-class triviality.) For the more popular Press – ‘yellow’ or ‘gutter’ as it used to be called – the original decision to go trivial, a hundred-odd  years ago, was a marketing one, based on what was conceived to be a popular demand. The newspaper magnate Lord Harmsworth (a Tory, of course) held that the ‘lower’ classes were only interested in sex, sensation and sport (today we could add another ‘S’, Strictly), and so concentrated his new Daily Mail’s reportage on those three things. ‘Do not forget that you are writing for the meanest intelligences’, its reporters were instructed. They never have forgotten, in 130 years. Hence the trivial nature of today’s tabloid press.

That – the press – must be a reason behind much of this trivialisation. This sort of media is not found in every country; not in Sweden, for example, where even the evening papers – the closest equivalents to the British tabloids – have serious political reportage (albeit alongside those three S’s); and even issue ‘Culture’ or ‘Arts’ supplements. (Americans may recognise the genre more easily.) Maybe the problem really is that we Brits (and Americans) are more superficial than the Swedes, more jokey (my Swedish friends think so), more sport- and sex-obsessed, and less interested in real politics; in other words more trivial ourselves. In that case, the trivialisation must be our own fault. Otherwise they – the rich newspaper proprietors – are foisting it upon us. I don’t know.

Trivialisation may not lie at the root of Britain’s present political troubles. The aforementioned lies, incompetence and stupidity are probably more significant, and behind them, no doubt, the monster of ‘late-stage capitalism’ (those press magnates). But it must enable those troubles, to a significant extent.

I’ve always disliked the Old Testament, ever since I was given it to study in ‘Divinity’ classes at school, and then seeing it through New Testament eyes in my former (very liberal: today it would be called ‘wokeish’) Christian church. But I’m glad now that I was made to read it, because it makes some sense of what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon today.

The Old Testament – roughly identical, as I understand it, to the Jewish Torah – has some good stuff in it, much of it appropriated by Christianity; but also contains some rank bigotry (Leviticus), silliness (dietary rules), bad pre-history (Genesis), and also wars, massacres of whole peoples (the Flood); and of course – as its main narrative – the sufferings but eventual triumph (hopefully) of ‘God’s chosen people’, inspired by heroic and supernaturally empowered ‘Prophets’.

I wonder whether Netanyahu sees himself as one of those? The IDF’s conduct in Palestine and latterly Lebanon – especially the indiscriminate bombing, widely seen as ‘genocidal’ – strike me as being very ‘Old Testament’ in character. Netanyahu seems to be casting himself as a successor to the old Prophets, the latest saviour of the Chosen People (and never mind the rest of humanity); with the USA, perhaps, performing the ‘supernatural’ role here.

(Incidentally – and I’m by no means the first person to raise this question: why do American Christians make so much of the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments, insisting that they be displayed in schools, for example; in preference to the New Testament’s – rather more woke-ish – Beatitudes?) 

But Netanyahu’s elevation to the status of an Old Testament prophet will of course require him to win his present war: the whole project, that is, not just the fight against the Hezbollah. And, of course, it also rests on worldwide Jewry’s acceptance of his militant, racist, nationalist, colonialist and frankly amoral reading of the Torah, which many other Jews dispute. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2024/08/24/gods-covenant/.) Moral: beware ‘holy books’. The Koran, of course, read selectively, serves much the same purpose for the other ‘side’.

I do hope these comments don’t brand me as ‘anti-Semitic’. It is of course difficult these days for even a friendly critic of Israel to avoid this.

‘…your Mum and Dad. They may not mean to, but they do.’ (That’s Philip Larkin, of course.)

Well, not necessarily; and I wouldn’t like to blame my parents for my own fuck-uppedness (everyone’s fucked up to a degree). But obviously one’s early upbringing has some influence on one’s later development, for good or for ill; together with many other factors, and – hopefully – one’s own free agency. In the course of our lives these influences mingle together in subtle and complex ways, so that one can never say for certain that – for example – Adolf Hitler was only the product of his upbringing by the Schicklgrubers, or Boris Johnson of his awful father and abused mother and – in loco parentis – his boarding school. That would be too simple.

Looking back on my own childhood, however, I can see how not I, but my mother, was clearly fucked up by her Mum and Dad; in ways that gave me an insight into how people of her generation, especially, could be fucked up, in ways that might have had an effect on history. She was the only child of a grim Baptist father, Ernest, and a doormat of a mother, who tried to block her marriage to my father on the grounds that his father was too working class – in reality there was only a sliver of difference between them socially – and as a result boycotted their wedding, so that a cousin of my father’s had to stand in to ‘give the bride away’. He also got my granddad sacked from the factory where he worked, until his fellow-workers went on strike to have him reinstated. He only visited us once, when I was about twelve; bringing me as a present a collection of ‘improving’ sermons. (I remember it was called In the Days of Thy Youth. Amazon have it: https://www.amazon.com/Days-Thy-Youth-Practical-Marlborough/dp/B00A84CHBI.) When he died he left my grandmother penniless and without a home, so that she had to move into a caravan on a relative’s farm. A curious thing about him was that at some stage he had changed his family name by deed poll from ‘Rabbit’ to ‘Rabbett’, which seemed odd to me; if he was paying all that money in legal fees (I presumed), why stick with a name which still sounded silly? (Maybe he thought it would be pronounced ‘Rabbé’, like Hyacinth Bucket (‘Bouquet’) in Keeping Up Appearances.)

I won’t elaborate on my poor mother’s fucked-upness here. Maybe later. But it’s too painful for me to recall just now; and I think ‘bad form’ for one to sneak on one’s own mother. It also looks like making excuses for one’s faults and failures. In the main I think I survived it.But who knows?

And besides, how much have I fucked up my own children? ‘We may not mean to, but we do.’

Is it normal for an 83 year-old to wake up every morning feeling that the world – or at least decent liberal society – is coming to an end? (I mean ‘liberal’ in the original broad sense of the term; not ‘neo-’.) Or is it simply my age; or my declining health; or my years of reading dystopian novels; or the events of today; or my present fascination with TV science documentaries chronicling the origin – and so by implication the destruction – of the entire universe?

I used to think that my early introduction to science fiction – specifically HG Wells and Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future (https://wordpress.com/post/bernardjporter.com/9678) – gave me a broader view of human events; a context for the narrow stretch of history I later came to write about professionally. And so it does. But now I’m beginning to regard it differently. What’s the point in my writing books for posterity, when the scientists tell us that posterity is going to hurtle into the sun eventually?

Not that I’m at all worried for my own work, or for me personally. The sun can frizzle us all up in a nano-second so far as I’m concerned. (Oblivion sounds quite attractive, the way I’m feeling now.) But what I will regret is some of the greatest artistic achievements of our current human civilisation being lost for ever: Mozart’s music, Leonardo’s paintings, Shakespeare’s Tragedies, the Elgin marbles, the great Gothic cathedrals of northern France – and their non-European equivalents; artefacts that to my mind justify our species, and in fact are the only things that do. To think that they might not last forever fills me with the deepest sorrow; especially in the wee small hours.

Of course there may be rescue on the way. Liberalism – real liberalism – might be more resistant to ‘populism’ than we fear. On the broader galactic front, maybe Mozart will survive the earth’s destruction, via the non-material internet. (Will our pdf files still be here when we’re gone?) Or those clever scientists might discover a way to bridge the universe and transport CDs, books and even buildings physically to distant and younger galaxies. Or are there other dimensions of reality – parallel universes – in which they might pop up again? (You can see the effect SciFi has had on me.) Of course we’ll never know; especially if oblivion is our next stage.

Religious people, I imagine, can cope with this. They don’t fear oblivion, but have a variety of alternative futures to look forward to: some of them horrific, true, but futures nonetheless. It’s almost worth joining a religion for the comfort of that. Angels with harps – playing Mozart? – sound nice and relaxing. 72 virgins rather less so. (Incidentally, do Moslem women get houris too?) Reincarnation seems chancy: suppose you are reborn as a beetle; or as yourself, but not remembering? (That’s my personal nightmare.) But at least religion gives one answers.

Sorry for this uncharacteristic diversion into the quasi-spiritual. It’s a long way from our more immediate worries, I admit; with Putin, Netanyahu, Trump and Farage currently in the ascendant, climate change threatening an Armageddon even earlier than the galactic one, and winter coming on. But for me these ‘big’ thoughts frame those more immediate concerns. They may not for other people. We’re programmed as a species to think only short-term; luckily, no doubt, for most of us.

Pleased as I am about the outcome of the recent UK general election, I’m still not happy about how it was secured, and – in particular – about the way it has given such a massive majority to Labour on the basis of only a third of the votes. I alluded to this in my previous post; and I expressed my discomfort over our ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system – a common complaint – in a much earlier blog: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/. But in that piece I also suggested a couple of ways in which we could reconcile the personal MP-constituency connexion, which we rightly value so much, with a more ‘proportional’ system, which should meet all the objections that First-Past-the-Posters have to PR. In the eight years since then I’ve not noticed anyone taking my ideas up. But then this blog is very obscure.

The article that ‘Phil’ sent me in response to yesterday’s post is worth everyone’s reading: https://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2024/09/03/understanding-the-2024-election-7/. (Thank you so much, Phil.) It shows how Labour played the FPTP game more cleverly than the Tories, which was unusual; but also how this means that their victory wasn’t really a ‘Labour’ one, and so is not something that the new government should rely on to get their reforms accepted by the public, as Attlee’s were. Of course more of the 66% might be brought around to them eventually; but with the dreadful tabloids, masquerading as the ‘public’, still baying at Starmer’s heels, it won’t be easy.

Keir Starmer presents as the antithesis of Boris Johnson, and is all the more welcome for that. In 1945 Clement Attlee was a bit of a dullard too. Each offered serious ‘change’ in Britain’s domestic politics, after a turbulent period of history; but whether the more recent period was quite turbulent enough to enable a revolution on Attlee’s post-War scale may be doubted.

Labour after all won only 9,708,716 votes in the recent election, or 33.7% of those who voted. That contrasts with 11,967,746 and 48% for Attlee’s government in 1945. More significantly, perhaps, the popular Labour vote back in 2019 – when the much maligned Corbyn was leader – was 10,295,907: which was significantly higher than Starmer’s last month. Which suggests that the latter’s decorbynisation of his party may have been less significant a factor in Labour’s win than he has been claiming, including in his (rather good, I thought) Conference speech today. Obviously detestation of the Tories was a bigger, if negative, factor. That was emphatically not true in Attlee’s case. People then voted for his programme. And back in 1945 he had Winston Churchill to defeat; a rather more formidable opponent than poor Rishi, or than any of the other inadequacies squabbling for his crown today.