Porter’s Pensées

As an immigrant here in Sweden – you might even say a refugee – but needing to return to the UK occasionally, I’ve recently become alarmed by the rapidly rising costs of air and rail travel there, even by ‘cheap’ airlines or with the benefit of Euro-railcards. A projected trip at the end of this month (including rail travel in England, grossly over-priced) is likely to set me back about £300. And then the same amount, I guess, to return.

In view of this I’m tempted to switch my political support to the far-Right Sweden Democrats, who are offering money to unwanted foreigners to enable them to return ‘home’. (See https://www.thelocal.se/20240819/sweden-democrats-push-to-overrule-inquiry-on-re-emigration-grants/.) I seem to remember Enoch Powell’s floating much the same idea for Britain in the 1960s. Did anything come of it? I doubt whether it will work in Sweden, either. But then you never can tell, these crazy days.

Of course it would make no sense my taking the money and buying a ticket to Blighty with it, if I weren’t allowed back. On the other hand, could they stop me re-entering Sweden with a Swedish passport (which I have)? And then my re-applying for the grant for another trip? I imagine that even the racists in the Sverigedemokraterna will have thought of that.

Could what we’re experiencing today in Britain – the economic and social problems, ludicrous governments, right-wing extremism, culture wars, riots and general anomie – be a sign or symptom, or even an effect, of what ex-US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously described in 1962 as Britain’s having ‘lost an Empire, but not yet found a rôle’?

Despite Conservative objections, that did not seem implausible at the time. A little early, perhaps: Britain still had a fair number of colonies to get rid of in 1962, and a pretty extensive ‘informal’ empire – money and influence – parts of which have managed to survive, albeit much attenuated, until today. All the same, once India had gone, then much of Africa, and following the Suez débacle in 1956, the writing was clearly – to everyone save a few deluded ‘Empire Loyalists’ – ‘on the wall’. This was obvious to most of us Brits then, and even more so to our ‘cousins’, like Acheson, across the water.

I don’t want to quarrel with this. Indeed, I’d put the effective loss of Britain’s ‘formal’ empire even earlier – see my The Lion’s Share. And the seeping away of the trappings of empire after the Second World War did leave spaces that needed to be filled by something. Empire Loyalists saw that ‘something’ as a revival – somehow – of the old Empire. Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe – was their final redoubt, which fell of course in 1980. The Falklands didn’t fall, but were hardly the foundation you could rebuild an Empire on. (They had always been marginal to British imperial power in any case.) The ‘Commonwealth’, which survived the breakup of the Empire, was another possible focus for post-imperial loyalty; but a rather too liberal, ‘multi-cultural’, weak and disobedient one for the Empire Loyalists and pro-Rhodesians to feel comfortable with. Much later on this vestigial ‘imperialism’ could also be said to be manifested in the Brexiteers’ ideas of a ‘global Britain’, the ‘Anglosphere’, post-European trade deals with former colonies, and the like.

But there were alternative ‘rôles’ on offer. One was for Britain to ally more closely with the USA. This was one of the earliest solutions offered, by people who as early as the 1890s saw the way things were going, including most notably the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes. The second – anathema to the likes of him – was for Britain to assert, or re-assert, her influence in the evolving (under a succession of different names) European Union. This of course was what eventually came to pass, when the Conservative government of Edward Heath finally negotiated Britain’s adhesion to it in 1973. That could have bestowed on Britain a new replacement ‘rôle’; and arguably did.

But not, of course, to the liking of those Britons who hankered after a more ‘independent’ and by implication ‘powerful’ rôle for their country; or – more importantly – of those who didn’t really care one way or another about what ‘rôle’ Britain should play in the world, but were willing to go along with the Brexiteers’ false argument that her ‘subservient’ one within the EU, and tracing this back, her loss of empire, were at the root of all their domestic woes.

So, in the event Britain has tried out two new putative national roles for herself since the loss of her formal empire. The first was the European one; the second the anti-European one, which seems to be fed with memories of what the old imperial role is supposed to have meant for her. Both have pretty well failed, rôle-wise; and it is this that could be said to confirm Acheson’s view: that Britain had no idea what she should do once the Empire had gone. In other words, we have still not ‘found a role’.

I say ‘we’; but the truth is that only a tiny minority of us Brits really cares a fig about our ‘role’. Most of us – apart from politicians and historians – are almost entirely indifferent about what part our nation plays and played in the world, until that ‘part’ is falsely tied in with more social and individual concerns, like today. I think I demonstrated this in my The Absent-Minded Imperialists; although I should point out in fairness that the reading presented there is controversial. Most people didn’t care about the Empire; and so hardly cared about it when it had gone. So the implication of Acheson’s claim – that it was important to them – is misleading.

In any case, ‘rôles’ can be established in other ways than by crudely political and military – ‘imperial’ – means. Cultural is one. Social is another. Economic is a third – although that way colonialism can lie. Moral is another. (The Dalai Llama has no battalions.) In the broader picture, power, control and empire are arguably less admirable and desirable than these, and many others. ‘We used to have an empire’, as Brexiteer mobs are sometimes heard shouting. – So what? We still have (or had) Shakespeare, Turner, some wonderful mediaeval cathedrals, our language, our universities, and the NHS. Empires never last for ever. Some of these might.

My first great literary (if you can call it that) enthusiasm was Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future. He was the comic-strip space hero of the Eagle’s front page in the early 1950s; in retrospect rather less science-fictiony than we thought at the time – the science all wrong, with for example the planet Venus more verdant than we now know it is in reality; and everything about it more redolent of the Second World War than of any imaginable future: Dan with his fat Lancastrian batman Digby, spaceships looking like Lancaster bombers minus their wings, and so on, and lots of chivalry – but in spite of all this sparking in me a life-long interest in science fiction, and in the questions about ‘life, the universe and everything’ that later more cerebral versions of this genre explored. The art work (by Frank Hampson) was superb too.

I’ve referenced Dan Dare before: https://bernardjporter.com/2021/05/28/dominic-mekon/. That post compared Dominic Cummings – remember him? – to the arch-villain of the strip, the Mekon. He (or it) was the tyrannical leader of the ‘Treens’ of Venus, with a huge green head and a tiny body. The head was the clue. It contained the pure science which was the Mekon’s means of controlling his subjects, but without room to take in what Dan regarded as more human (or ‘British’) characteristics; such as empathy, charity, and simple decency. He (it) was obviously part of the ‘evil genius’ tradition in stories and novels that went back for decades; probably as far as the hyper-fictional ‘Satan’.

Elon Musk’s head is not as big as the Mekon’s; but his ambition appears to be comparable. In common with most people, I first associated him with electric cars and spaceships, which did not seem to be bad things in themselves – indeed, the opposite if you were brought up on Dan Dare. But then I learned of his takeover of Twitter, which as a modern technology dum-dum I knew little about then, and still do. (My only contact with this field is the present one: Facebook.) But now that I know what Musk can do with his immense riches and power, and arguably has done already through his liberation of Twitter from almost any sort of ethical moderation, with results we saw in the riots that took place in England a week ago: fake ‘tweets’ empowering far-Rightists and provoking them to attack immigrants and Muslims; and with what I’ve since learned about his background (South Africa), his own far-Right leanings, and from the testimony of his transgender daughter: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender-daughter-vivian-wilson-interview-rcna163665; I’m now fully aware of the danger he poses. In this regard he can be seen as the digital-age successor to that other media Satan, Rupert Murdoch. Isn’t it interesting – and maybe significant – that both these men originally came from ex-British colonies:  ‘The Empire Strikes Back’? (That of course was bound to occur to me, as an Imperial historian.)

Obviously we shouldn’t allow billionaires to dominate our national discourse in this way. But that’s what happens when you give a privileged ‘freedom’ to capitalist speech.

*

Incidentally, I still return to Dan Dare occasionally, in the bound facsimiles published by Titan Comics over the last ten years. I recently acquired The Earth Stealers, reproducing issues from June 1961 to March 1962, which was a few years after I had stopped subscribing to the original. The quality had declined by then – no Frank Hampson, for a start – but I was intrigued to find a story-line based on Dan’s returning to a future earth via a time-warp, and witnessing the near-destruction of the Earth by global warming, graphically illustrated with images of the Houses of Parliament burning, and so on. That looks quite prophetic for its time (16 December 1961). – If I can find a way to, I may post a few frames of it later. (I haven’t yet got to the end of the story, so I can’t tell you whether Dan saves the earth yet again; or whether the Mekon is involved.)

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.