Porter’s Pensées

Thank God (or whomever) for last night. No neo-Fascist riots in Britain, although they had been widely predicted. Instead, huge friendly pro-immigrant crowds, with music and dancing, but no reported violence, and the few neo-Nazis who did show up having to be safeguarded – probably unnecessarily – by the police they’d been hurling bricks at the weekend before.

Maybe it was the police presence that deterred the ultras. (They’re not really very brave. ‘Tommy Robinson’ was apparently hiding away on holiday in Cyprus. Is that true?) Or – more likely in my view – it may be that the counter-demonstrations represented the country rather better than the Far Rightists, despite the latters’ claims to be ‘speaking for Britain’, and the noise they (usually) make.

That’s the case I was trying to argue in my Britain’s Contested History. It’s difficult to define ‘Britishness’, and not very useful, I think; but ‘toleration’ must be there somewhere, as one of our best – if not universal, or exclusive – traits. Which is why Theresa May’s evocation of Britain’s ‘Hostile Environment’ in 2012, as a way of deterring immigrants, could be seen as deeply ‘unpatriotic’; and can also be regarded as the foundation stone – built on afterwards by two other vile women: Priti Patel and Suella Braverman – of the minority racist nationalism we saw in English city centres before last night.

Observing all this from a thousand miles away, I feel just a little bit better now.

Universities in Britain – especially the newer ones – are often ridiculed for offering degree courses in so-called ‘Mickey Mouse’ subjects, in order to attract a wider range of punters. As an ex-university teacher of a more ‘traditional’ and – I would say – rigorous subject, I would go along with some of this criticism.

But then what about the Olympic Games in recent years? A few decades ago it was just Athletics. (A few millennia ago the Games included Poetry; but we’ll leave that aside for the moment.) Now we have Beach Volleyball, Ping-Pong, Shooting, Synchronised Swimming, Swimming Backwards (why not Running Backwards?), Walking whilst Wobbling your Bottom, Horses Doing Funny Walks… and, for pity’s sake, as I learn today: Skateboarding.

Skateboarding! Whatever will come next? Marbles? Conkers? Hopping on One Leg? Crazy Golf? Darts? Snakes and Ladders? – Even I might stand a chance with some of these, as (at 83) one of the least athletic people on earth. But the Olympics have already been devalued enough.

Maybe there could be an alternative or ancillary Olympic Games, like there is for athletes with disabilities (Paralympians); but this time for kids, and taking in the kids’ sports. Or, alternatively, bring the original Greek Olympics back; with the Poetry contest included, of course.

But this really is trivial, by the side of Gaza, Ukraine, and the riots in England. Sorry.

It looks as if I returned from England just in time. According to Elon Musk, ‘civil war is inevitable’ there now, after the riots of the last weekend. Wouldn’t that be great for Musk’s newly-acquired social media site ‘X’ (formerly ‘Twitter’) – all that enhanced traffic, the hatred, the threats, the lies, and the dollars flooding in?

If this isn’t an incitement to civil war, I don’t know what is. One best way to encourage an event is to persuade people that it’s bound to happen anyway. That’s what Enoch Powell tried to do fifty years ago – ‘rivers of blood’, and all that. In that case it didn’t quite happen, fortunately. Hopefully we can staunch the stream today.

Obviously not all the rioters can be accurately characterised as ‘Far Right’ or – more recently – as ‘terrorists’. The Far Right has a political agenda, or a number of them, which can be defined and spelled out; most of our recent rioters however, judging from their posts on social media, can’t even spell. They really do seem to be ‘mindless hooligans’, motivated by the process – getting into fights and smashing things – rather than by any recognisable ‘cause’. When they’re asked to justify their actions in terms of ‘causes’, they display a degree of ignorance and irrationality which is astounding, and easy for thinking people to demolish. (James O’Brien on LBC Radio is good at this.) We can perhaps blame ‘toxic masculinity’ for this, with most rioters being men and boys; which may well indicate a genetic condition – testosterone and all that – imbuing males from birth with hatred and a proclivity for violence. (Not me, of course.) But I have no expertise in this field. (Kajsa, who is an expert, tells me no. It’s conditioning.)

Of course, many of the rioters have genuine grievances; but not against the targets that they’re putting the blame on today: asylum seekers, refugee hotels, Moslems, foreign-looking people generally, the out-of-touch ‘intelligentsia’, the police, Greggs pastry shops, ‘wokeism’, and so on. The real sources of their resentments are broader and deeper: gross inequality, welfare cuts, inadequate education, undirected migration, consumer culture perhaps, an electoral system that they will feel – reasonably – doesn’t adequately represent them; and a vile popular press exploiting all this and diverting it into avenues that leave the real culprits in the clear.

That’s where the ‘Far Right’ enters the picture. Theirs is the political agenda, or agendas, that make it worthwhile manipulating these movements of vague ‘protest’ for their own end; which is a more ‘Rightist’ form of government, that any historian of modern Britain and/or Europe would recognise as being authoritarian, liberal economically but not in other ways, and at least proto-Fascist, if not the whole hog. Certain foreign agents may well be involved here too; in particular Putin’s deeply illiberal Russia.

If a new ‘English civil war’ is brewing, then this will be one of its agencies. It already has a kind of pre-echo in the so-called ‘culture wars’, which are even now dividing people sharply, and might – who knows – morph into armed rebellion. Jonathan Swift’s Big Enders and Little Enders come to mind, as a war borne of a triviality.

But Musk has probably been misled by his own Lilliputian social media. Civil War? That’s a very big claim.

The Swedish Foreign Office, incidentally, today recommends that if Swedes want to travel to England, they should avoid large crowds. I don’t suppose that this advice has been given before, at least since World War II.

Immigration is a problem just now in England mainly because people think it is. Which is not to say that there aren’t genuinely problematic aspects to it – housing the refugees, for example; accommodating them safely in the meantime; adjudicating their claims to asylum quickly; rescuing them from drowning in la manche in some cases; rooting out the evil people exploiting them – but only that the major political problem surrounding immigration is the hostility shown by some settled Britons towards it, manifested in the riots that have been smashing up mainly northern English cities this past weekend, including my own.

How many of these anti-immigrant protesters there are is difficult to tell: clearly several thousands overall, probably millions; but in most cases their ‘demonstrations’ are reported to have been met with much larger ones defending the refugees, despite the antis’ claiming to represent the ‘British people’ in this regard. ‘Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here’ was the dominant chant heard in Hull’s Victoria Square on Saturday. The pride that local residents are taking in clearing up the messes that the rioters leave behind them – smashed windows, looted shops, burned-out cars – may also be testimony to this. But of course it’s hard to know. And the anti-immigrants are noisier, and more violent.

In fact, of course, immigrants of all kinds are and always have been a net bonus to British society, as several surveys of their medium-term economic impact have shown: paying taxes, providing much-needed labour, especially to the National Health Service, and – albeit not a directly economic benefit, this – enriching British culture greatly. They usually ‘integrate’ well, if not homogenously, although that might take a few years; and very often get on famously with ‘native’ Brits. (Especially in Scotland, apparently, where you don’t find the same degree of anti-alien feeling.) But they do need government or local government policies positively directed to settling and integrating them: educating them, teaching them English (or Welsh), housing them suitably; and avoiding, if possible, their living in ‘ghettoes’, divorced from the rest of English society.

Or ‘societies’, I should have written; because one of the truly distinctive things about Britain is how essentially ‘multi-cultural’ she has always been. This is why when asked to define or characterise ‘Englishness’ English people are usually lost for words, or else resort to vague generalities and trivialities, like respect for the law (difficult to recognise in the case of this weekend’s rioters), or the monarchy, cricket and queuing for buses. Britain is of course – and was even before the new immigrants arrived – a mix of several national and regional cultures, overlaid by other religious and class ones; which have always jostled for primacy without any one of them winning out. If there is an ‘alien’ culture threatening a broader English identity today, I could make out a case for its being the upper-class one encouraged in the ‘Public’ schools, and exemplified by Boris, Cameron and their ilk, living in their ghettoes, in the Cotswolds and elsewhere;  which most working and lower-middle class people in Britain wouldn’t recognise as part of their ‘national identity’ at all.  As one slogan put it recently: ‘It’s not the Estonians you need to fear; it’s the Etonians’. That’s where the main fault-line lies in British society, and always has; not the one between British-born, and foreign.

There’s much for a government to do here, but not by imprisoning them in disused military camps, or dumping them in the middle of Africa. Sweden, with a similar problem a few years ago, and a similar far-right movement born in reaction to it, has chosen more moderate and constructive ways, with some (although not complete) success. Governments could also meet the argument that refugees were ‘costing’ the country too much by providing adequate services – especially medical, educational and housing – for all their citizens. That should also tackle the wider popular frustrations that clearly fuel the far Right movement generally. The other thing that needs to be done is to bear down in some way on the propaganda, by politicians like Nigel Farage, and in the popular print press and on social media, and the lies that are pushed out to – for example – tar innocent asylum-seekers, especially Moslems, with being criminals, terrorists and paedophiles. That’s one of the most dangerous aspects of this whole affair. It’s almost as if the far Right wants to prolong these frustrations in order to provoke and justify an even further Right – genuinely Fascist – government in Britain.

Interestingly, Swedish TV News programmes have put Britain’s weekend riots at the top of their running order over the last two days. So Europe is noticing.

This is the first time I’ve seen all my books stacked together – with a couple of duplicates, but minus a few later editions. I brought them back with me to Stockholm last month.

It occurs to me that having written all these books (and a few articles) on refugees, colonialism, the police and British ‘national identity’, I wonder why I’ve not been approached by the media for my views on the present traumatic situation in British cities, when those views might surely be of interest and even relevance?

But then the fairly distant past – which is where I’ve lived all my professional life – is rarely of interest to politicians, journalists and rioters, except to be simplified, distorted and cherry-picked for propagandistic reasons; leaving us more discriminating ‘experts’, as Michael Gove once sneeringly dismissed us, sobbing impotently on the margins of public life.

I’m following the news coming from my English home town from afar, and with increasing sorrow and anger; but also encouraged by the fact, as reported, that the pro-refugee counter-demonstrations far outnumber the neo-Fascist ones. The Ukrainians I’m sheltering in my Hull house tell me they are safe, but not daring to venture into the city centre.

More on this (I hope) later.

The horrible knife-murders of those very young children at a dance class in Stockport the other day, and the violent riots that followed them there and elsewhere, the latter exploited if not directly incited by the far Right, are deeply depressing. I’d hoped that with the election in Britain of a superficially less ‘nasty’ new government a month ago this sort of thing would have begun to die down. Not a bit of it – yet. But then the grievances behind the rioting, real and imagined, and the hatreds that have been stoked by people like Farage over the last fourteen years of Conservative rule, are too ingrained to be eliminated by a few million crosses on ballot papers. They run too deep and wide. Labour needs time.

One of the (many) villains of this piece identified currently is (or are) the ‘social media’: internet-enabled discussion and propaganda platforms owned by rich millionaires but open to everyone, and hardly policed at all, it seems, by any kind of moderating authority. It’s the social media which has been disseminating most of the lies that are used to justify the attacks that have been launched against mosques, the police, and more indiscriminately; on the grounds that the knife-murderer is a refugee, even one of the small-boat Channel-crossing asylum seekers that Farage has particularly in his sights, and a Moslem: none of which appears to be true. Millions of people soak up these lies; with the results we’ve just seen, and may be repeated later. Many young men apparently just love having an excuse to smash things up. (That – toxic masculinity – is another area that needs to be explored if we are to get to the bottom of the Southport shenanigans.)

I’ve nothing useful to contribute to the discussion on this, apart from one idea – and that not a terribly original one. A key feature of the social media is that people’s contributions to it are allowed to be either anonymous, or pseudonymous (written over pen names). The arguments from principle for this are that it encourages ‘free speech’, which might be cramped if you have to attach your name to everything you write; and so attracts more people to offer their opinions, which makes it more ‘democratic’. These were the points that were put to me when, ten or a dozen years ago, I first objected to this practice either on the LRB blog, or on my own blogsite in its early days. (I’ve searched back for this particular post, but can’t find it now.) I remember that I made a good case there for outlawing ‘anonymous’ posts altogether, except in certain specific and narrow circumstances, like ‘whistle-blowing’, or where it might lose one one’s job. Otherwise anonymous blogs, tweets and the like should be regarded like anonymous letters usually are; in other words, as a mark of sheer cowardice, absolving the perpetrators from all accountability for their actions and views.

One of the profoundest sorrows of my life as an observer of politics is the way Jews, once the most visible and extreme victims of Fascism, have now taken on many of the attributes and actions of Fascism themselves. I say ‘Jews’, and emphatically not ‘the Jews’, because Netanyahu and his clique are clearly not representative of Jewry generally; with most Jews being – I like to think – as unsupportive of Israel’s hideous crimes in Gaza, and of the religio-racist ideology that appears to be one of the factors lying behind them, as are most of the goyim. You’ll find opposition to Israel’s present policies in Gaza, and even to the idea of a single-religion-dominated State of Israel itself, widespread in the Jewish diaspora, even among the Rabbinate; scotching the accusation that it must be an ‘anti-Semitic’ trope.

That of course is the charge, together with the terrible memory of the Nazi holocaust, which has protected Israel from some of the criticism that it might otherwise justly have attracted to itself, and is normal when deployed against other similarly aggressive and colonialist powers. The charge of anti-Semitism, ‘weaponised’ in this way, has a lot to answer for; quite apart from crippling the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s, and so prolonging the political mayhem that the Conservatives inflicted on us afterwards – until Labour found a new more Israel-friendly leader for itself. I personally shall never forgive the ‘Israel lobby’, as it’s called, for this. It has done much to erode much of the pro-Jewish feeling I instinctively used to share with most other progressive Britons, before then.

What I fervently wish is that Judaism could revert back to the purely personal belief-system that most religions are, enriching the cultures of all the societies that harbour it: this of course depends on those societies tolerating it; or, if it still feels it requires a state apparatus to protect it from future holocausts, to have its Israel, but more liberally conceived, side-by-side with a viable and hopefully friendly Palestinian state, and – crucially – based on the frank admission that the acquisition of land from the their previous Arab occupiers in the 1940s and ’60s, was a crime. And, of course, there must be none of this nonsense about God ‘promising’ it to them. That only fools Jewish Zionists and American Evangelicals. Why should the Godless amongst us have any truck with it?

Many other nations are established on ‘stolen’ lands: the USA among them. Israel is not alone in this regard. What might make a difference is to acknowledge it, apologetically, as I think Americans do; and to proceed on from there. – But in the present situation this does, I admit, seem naïve.

I regard Harold Wilson as one of the greatest of our peace-time prime ministers: monstrously vilified at the time from the political Right – paranoiacs in MI5 even had him marked as a Soviet spy – but a good and highly intelligent man, an effective unifier of his fissiparous party, a great enabler of social and educational reform, the man who kept us out of the Vietnam war, and a great Yorkshire ‘character’, if you weren’t an upper-class snob. He retired as PM unexpectedly, and relatively young: some said as a result of the constant right-wing plotting against him, but more likely because of the incipient Alzheimers that first surfaced when he once lost his way in a Labour conference speech. It was very sad: for him personally of course, but also for the country; and the personal tragedy is underlined by this report in today’s Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/23/former-pm-harold-wilson-sold-private-papers-fund-care-alzheimers – where it is revealed that he fell into such bad times in retirement that he contemplated selling his private and governmental papers to cover the cost of his social and medical care.

Of course today no retiring PM would be – or has been – left in such a predicament. The Tory ones of course have usually had considerable private funds in any case, which they could supplement with generous gifts from those they had ‘helped’ as prime minister. Then there are memoirs to be written (or ghost-written); well-paid journalism in right-wing newspapers; lectures to wealthy ‘think-tanks’, especially in America; and highly-paid directorships or consultancies for friendly companies and agencies. On the (relative) Left, Tony Blair seems presently to be making a mint in most of these ways, as an enterprising and bankable ‘Ex’. And Gordon Brown is doing OK.

But these options appear not to have been open to Wilson. I don’t suppose either of his autobiographies made him rich. He had few wealthy patrons (Lord Kagan, the raincoat man?). And the celebrity lecture tour was less of a feature then, even if he could have been trusted to overcome his dementia to speak intelligently.

But then ‘high’ politics then was less seen as a road to riches than it seems to be today. Most of our MPs and Ministers give the impression of being in it for themselves, financially and reputation-wise: ‘career choices’; as you would expect in a capitalist society, where individual ‘betterment’ is a bigger desideratum than any idea of ‘service’. Look at Boris. This may be an essential difference between Wilson’s time and ours. I’m hoping – rather optimistically – that Starmer and his team might turn the clock back in this regard.

An unexpected pleasure of our long drive up from Rotterdam to Stockholm was to visit the north German/Hanseatic churches along the way; all built in brick, usually regarded as an inferior building material to stone – more domestic than monumental – but often disguised as stone in their soaring interiors, which may attest to this. I’ve never before seen such tall, narrow late Gothic windows.

Or so many wind turbines – graceful, natural, and greatly beautifying the countryside, in my view. Are there no Nimbys in northern Germany?

PS. I know there are other examples of brick Gothic, including in my own stone-poor county of Essex. But none so impressive as these.

For those of you who haven’t come across these already, here are Trump’s running-mate’s takes on (a) Donald Trump himself in 2016; and (b) the corrosive effect of his own alma mater (Yale), and of universities generally, today. The first is remarkable not only for the volte-face it illustrates in order for Vance to be able to come to the support of Trump in 2024, but also, I believe, for its generally intelligent reading of the situation in ‘rust-belt’ America eight years before. The second is a vivid example of what I would regard as the ‘anti-intellectualism’ which powers many ‘populist’ movements on both sides of the Atlantic presently. Academics (and ex-Academics), beware!

(a) Opioid of the Masses 

To many, Donald Trump feels good, but he can’t fix America’s growing social and cultural crisis, and the eventual comedown will be harsh. 

By J. D. Vance JULY 4, 2016 

 A few Saturdays ago, my wife and I spent the morning volunteering at a community garden in our San Francisco neighborhood. After a few hours of casual labor, we and the other volunteers dispersed to our respective destinations: tasty brunches, day trips to wine country, art-gallery tours. It was a perfectly normal day, by San Francisco standards. That very same Saturday, in the small Ohio town where I grew up, four people overdosed on heroin. A local police lieutenant coolly summarized the banality of it all: “It’s not all that unusual for a 24-hour period here.”

He was right: in Middletown, Ohio, that too is a perfectly normal day. Folks back home speak of heroin like an apocalyptic invader, something that assailed the town mysteriously and without warning. Yet the truth is that heroin crept slowly into Middletown’s families and communities—not by invasion but by invitation. Very few Americans are strangers to addiction. Shortly before I graduated from law school, I learned that my own mother lay comatose in a hospital, the consequence of an apparent heroin overdose. Yet heroin was only her latest drug of choice. Prescription opioids—”hillbilly heroin” some call it, to highlight its special appeal among white working-class folks like us—had already landed Mom in the hospital and cost our family dearly in the decade before her first taste of actual heroin. And before her own father gave up the bottle in middle age, he was a notoriously violent drunk.

In our community, there has long been a large appetite to dull the pain; heroin is just the newest vehicle. Of course, the pain itself has increased in recent years, and it comes from many places. Some of it is economic, as the factories that provided many U.S. towns and cities material security have downsized or altogether ceased to exist. Some of it is aesthetic, as the storefronts that once made American towns beautiful and vibrant gave way to cash-for-gold stores and payday lenders. Some of it is domestic, as rising divorce rates reveal home lives as dependable as steel-mill jobs. Some of it is political, as Americans watch from afar while a government machine that rarely tries to speak to them, and acts in their interests even less, sputters along. And some of it is cultural, from the legitimate humiliation of losing wars fought by the nation’s children to the illegitimate sense that some fall behind only because others jump ahead. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.

During this election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too, promises a quick escape from life’s cares, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture. It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump. Last Sunday, the day before Memorial Day, I met a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War at a local coffee shop. “I was lucky,” he told me. “At least I came home. A lot of my buddies didn’t. The thing is, the media still talks about us like we lost that war! I like to think my dead friends accomplished something.” Imagine, for that man, the vengeful joy of a Trump rally. That brief feeling of power, of defiance, of sending a message to the very political and media establishment that, for 45 years, has refused to listen. Trump brings power to those who hate their lack of it, and his message is tonic to communities that have felt nothing but decline for decades.

In some ways, Trump’s large, national coalition defies easy characterization. He draws from a broad base of good people: kind folks who open their homes and hearts to people of all colors and creeds, married couples with happy homes and families who live nearby, public servants who put their lives on the line to fight fires in their communities. Not all Trump voters spend their days searching for an analgesic. Yet a common thread among Trump’s faithful, and even among those whose individual circumstances remain unspoiled, is that they hail from broken communities. These are places where good jobs are impossible to come by. Where people have lost their faith and abandoned the churches of their parents and grandparents. Where the death rates of poor white people go up even as the death rates of all other groups go down. Where too many young people spend their days stoned instead of working and learning. Many years ago, our neighbor (and my grandma’s old friend) in Middletown moved out and rented his house on a Section 8 voucher—a federal program that offers housing subsidies to low-income people. One of the first folks to move in called her landlord to report a leaky roof. By the time the landlord arrived, he discovered the woman naked on her couch. After calling him, she had started the water for a bath, gotten high, and passed out. Forget about the original leak, now much of the upstairs—including her and her children’s possessions—was completely destroyed.

Not every Trump voter lives like this woman, but nearly every Trump voter knows someone who does. Though the details differ, men and women like my neighbor represent, in the aggregate, a social crisis of historic proportions. There is no group of people hurtling more quickly to social decay. No group of people fears the future more, dies with such frequency from heroin, and exposes its children to such significant domestic chaos. Not long ago, a teacher who works with at-risk youth in my hometown told me, “We’re expected to be shepherds to these children, but they’re all raised by wolves.” And those wolves are here—not coming in from Mexico, not prowling the halls of power in Washington or Wall Street—but here in ordinary American communities and families and homes.

What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.

The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it. I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.

(b) The Universities are the Enemy

https://bryanalexander.org/politics/the-professors-are-the-enemy-j-d-vance-on-higher-education/.

Looking back to the 1930s, doesn’t this sound just a little Fascistic to you?