Porter’s Pensées

To a scholar, or I would have thought any educated person, the word ‘extremism’ doesn’t signify much. You can have an ‘extreme’ anything; even ‘extreme moderation’, if you’re willing to be pedantic about it (and a bit silly). Extremism is a word that is used rather loosely and vaguely today, generally in order to describe opinions and activities which go further than one’s own in one direction or another; all of which could be easily and more clearly expressed in other ways. Racism is an obvious example; but then maybe anti-racism too, depending on the form it takes? Support for terrorism is another. Fascism comes into this category, so long as it’s carefully defined; and communism, ditto. (There are several different species of both.) Others might include pacifism, noisy demonstrations, veganism, anti-vaccination, anti- or pro-abortion, flat-earthism, UFO-ism, and many dogmatic forms of religion. Beliefs that were considered ‘extreme’ in the past, but no longer are, include atheism, democracy and feminism. That just indicates how the meaning of abstract words can change. I’m faintly puzzled by the fact that ‘neoliberalism’ is rarely categorised as ‘extremist’ today, as I’m pretty sure it will be when history moves on. That’s because it has now come to be ‘normalised’; although in logic that should not make it any less ‘extreme’.

Recently British government ministers, led by Michael Gove, have been working on a plan to outlaw ‘extremism’, based on their own definition of it as ‘the promotion or advancement of any ideology which aims to overturn or undermine the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy, its institutions and values’. (See https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/04/plans-to-redefine-extremism-would-include-undermining-uk-values.) Obviously that is almost as vague and catch-all as the e-word itself – what ‘system’? which ‘institutions? what ‘values’? – but is nonetheless the definition that Gove and his right-wing colleagues are now seeking to pass into law. (See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/09/revealed-legal-fears-over-michael-gove-definition-extremism.)

With no more detailed guidance being offered as to the particular ideas and groups that are being targeted, all we have to go on is the views and policies of Conservative ministers and MPs in recent months. What they have been concentrating on are pro-Palestinian – or indeed any – demonstrations, especially those that stop traffic; Moslems; the ‘culture wars’; ‘no-platforming’; gender transitioning; lethal attacks on MPs (fair enough, but they have the ordinary law to counter that); and the residue of ‘Corbynism’ (which might include me). It’s the demonstrations, I think, that mainly irritate them, and that they would like to literally outlaw altogether if they could. Suella Braverman calls them ‘hate marches’, which of course they aren’t, but is a good way of blackening them. Already the legislation governing ‘demos’ has been tightened up, in ways that are alarming civil rights advocates. But this is just the sort of thing that our right-wing government thinks the reactionary ‘red wall’ (northern working-class voters) will respond to in the coming general election. And the word ‘extremism’ helps here too.

I don’t know how it can be countered. Perhaps Keir Starmer does. (I’m presently up to page 307 of Tom Baldwin’s recent biography of him: no clue so far.) The conventional wisdom is that the Tories are now reconciled to losing the election, when they’ll regroup on the even further Right of British politics, to resume battle from that ‘extreme’. But of course they won’t call it this. One person’s ‘extremism’ is another’s ‘common sense’, or ‘voice of the people’. It’s just a word, intended to confound.

My doctors’ surgery in Stockholm. I suppose you could say that they shouldn’t be wasting their time with this sort of nonsense; but in Britain they wouldn’t have the time.

The NHS isn’t working. (This is in the UK.) The dental service isn’t working. The Home Office isn’t working (especially with regard to immigration). Local government isn’t working. The Police aren’t working (properly). The Army is grossly undermanned. Now we learn that HMRC (our tax authority) isn’t working either: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/hmrc.

And all because of underfunding; starting with Chancellor Osborne’s ‘austerity’ programme ten years ago – or Thatcher’s privatisations before him – and the unstated purpose behind those measures: which was the dismantling of the welfare state. That the ideals underlying that great institution are also no longer working, is shown by the widening wealth gap that is developing in the country; again, it seems, as a deliberate strategy – or at least a happily tolerated side-effect – on the part of our rulers.

Some of this I can relate to from personal experience. I’ve posted about my problems with the NHS before; hence my current refuge in Sweden. Just now I’m being hounded by whichever computers are currently running HMRC, to pay them the £5000 they’re demanding of me, but which I certainly don’t owe. (No details here – too boring – except to say that I’ve paid the £5000 anyway, just to get HMRC off my back. I’m hoping for a refund if and when a sentient human being comes into their office to check on the robots, and reply to my letters.)

I’m luckier than most – getting along OK on my (half-) pension, with Swedish doctors, and not needing the police or the Army, yet; but I can fully understand the discontent that currently pervades the country, leading our prime minister two days ago to warn, quite dramatically (from a podium hurriedly erected outside No.10 Downing Street, which led everyone to expect a major announcement, like a war or an election), against ‘extremism’, ‘fake news’ and the prospect of what he called ‘mob rule’ in Britain (https://www.politico.eu/article/britain-tipping-into-mob-rule-says-prime-minister-rishi-sunak/). By ‘extremism’ he clearly didn’t mean extreme neo-liberalism; by ‘fake news’ his own government’s lies; and by ‘mob rule’ he seems to have been alluding to the protest demonstrations that are taking place weekly in London in support of the Palestinians. These have been described by ex-Home Secretary Suella Braverman as ‘hate marches’; but by all reliable accounts they have been 99% peaceful, disciplined, friendly and good-tempered, (Even Jews are joining in.)

It really is now looking like the beginning of a collapse of the post-war ‘social contract’ in Britain, which this government is planning to meet in traditional right-wing – even quasi-fascist – ways: bearing down on political demonstrations – ‘you’ve made your point’ (that’s the current Home Secretary) – and creating an easily-identified ‘enemy’, in the guise of migrants and ‘Islamism’, to divert blame from the real authors of our woes.

Which are, of course, the present government, which I think my lifetime’s research into modern British history qualifies me to opine is the most clueless and even frankly ridiculous of the past two centuries’; and secondly, the broader and more impersonal factors that this government is facing, which are evidently quite beyond its intelligence and experience to understand, let alone to counter. In the meantime we have to put up with crazy policies (Rwanda!), poor healthcare, a raggle-taggle army, on-going economic decline, overworked and sometimes corrupt police officers, no close allies, no-one to respond to my tax queries; and – to help us all out – a B-list cast of government ministers who wouldn’t look out of place in a ‘Carry-On’ film. Will the expected Labour government be much better? We can only hope.

Rishi Sunak claims that he is ‘living proof that Britain isn’t a racist country’. That’s in connection with the current row over whether or not Lee Anderson MP’s claim that the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, is ‘controlled’ by militant Islamists, was ‘Islamophobic’. Khan of course is a British Moslem; Sunak a Hindu of East Asian heritage. Anderson had the Tory ‘whip’ removed from him as a result of his ‘Islamist’ slur against Khan. (He may be off to join an even more right-wing party now.) A couple of days earlier Suella Braverman MP had claimed much the same as Anderson in a Daily Telegraph article, but without mentioning names; which is the reason given by the prime minister for not sanctioning her in the same way. At around the same time another Tory MP, Paul Scully, had to apologise for claiming that there were ‘no-go-areas’ for non-Moslems in London and Birmingham; which is false. – Islamophobia is of course today’s more acceptable equivalent of anti-semitism. There’s a lot of it about; far more, probably, than of genuine Judenhetze. But that’s only my guess.

Back to Rishi Sunak. – He may be right – I hope he is – to say that there’s less racism in Britain than there used to be, and by comparison with certain other countries of the world. But he’s wrong in thinking that his situation today, as the Asian-origin prime minister of a predominantly ‘white’ Britain, is ‘proof’ of that. The fact is that upper-class and wealthy non-Europeans have always been treated far more kindly in Britain than ordinary black or brown folk, even at their posh schools and universities. (Remember that ex-Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is an Old Etonian.) This is undoubtedly true of the British upper classes. David Cannadine’s book, Ornamentalism (2001), illustrates it in the case of the old British Colonial and Indian civil services, showing public school-educated rulers getting along famously, and pretty equally, with African or Indian chiefs and rajas. And remember that the Tories once had a Jewish leader. In all these circumstances, ‘class’ easily trumped ‘race’.

Whether or not this was also true of the more deferential British ‘lower’ classes is hard to say. But in any case it makes Sunak’s experience (Winchester, Stanford, Oxford, rich as Croesus) totally atypical.

[Sources: for Anderson, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13129007/Rishi-Sunak-says-hes-living-proof-Britain-isnt-racist-country-amid-row-suspended-MP-Lee-Andersons-claims-Sadiq-Khan-controlled-Islamists.html; for Braverman, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/26/suella-braverman-condemns-hysterical-row-about-islamophobia/; and for Scully: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-68412010.%5D

I think I can understand – and even empathise with – what’s in the minds of people in Europe and America who vote for right-wing, ‘populist’ parties these days. Not necessarily in the minds of their leaders, who may be merely exploiting ‘popular’ views for reasons of their own; but the sorts of folk who phone into radio stations like GB Radio, which I’ve been tuning into quite a lot recently. (I’m sure that other countries have their equivalents – Fox News?)

You can tell a lot about ‘public opinion’ – or a slice of it – from programmes like GB Radio’s. Today for example phoners-in expressed almost universal support for Lee Anderson’s recent islamophobic remarks about the mayor of London – for which he has had the Conservative whip withdrawn from him (for foreign readers: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/24/lee-anderson-stripped-of-tory-whip-over-sadiq-khan-comment); and condemnation of Shamima Begum (see my last post). Other common opinions expressed are against immigration (‘stop the boats’), anti-political demonstrations, anti-‘woke’ (variously but usually very vaguely defined), Islamophobia, anti-civil service, suspicion of ‘intellectuals’, anti-the ‘Westminster bubble’, anti-‘establishment’, (now called the ‘permanent state’), and anti-‘government’ generally; all in the supposed interests of ‘real people’ in the ‘real world’ (that’s Lee Anderson’s words, introducing his weekly slot on GB Radio today).

Sceptical of ‘historical parallels’ as I am, I can’t help being reminded of 1920s Germany; where similar views gave rise to Nazism, against the background of the sort of economic depression that seems to be affecting many people – certainly in Britain – right now. Replace 1920s German Jews by Moslems or ‘Islamists’ as today’s convenient scapegoats, and you have an almost perfect fit. Anderson and our former Home Secretary Suella Braverman are even constructing a full-blown ‘conspiracy theory’ around this, charging Islamists with taking ‘control’ of the country, or at least of its capital (for Braverman, see https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-suella-braverman-says-islamists-now-control-britain); doubtless in league, as ex-PM Liz Truss argued the other day at an extreme-Right American conference, with ‘trans activists’ who had infiltrated the civil service, no less (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/21/liz-truss-deep-state-cpac-far-right). It’s all looking a bit scary, for progressive liberals – whether ‘trans’ or not. (Another speaker at that American conference claimed that ‘progressive’ was simply another word for ‘communist’.)

I recognise a lot of this kind of talk from my very early years, in a lower-middle class family, and at one of those schools that liked to think it was ‘Public’, but really wasn’t. (It was a ‘Direct Grant’ grammar.) One year we had a ‘mock’ election, which I wasn’t allowed to vote in – too young at 14 – but was prevailed upon, as the school artist, to design posters for the ‘RWNP’, or ‘Right-Wing Nationalist Party’ – before I understood what those words meant or implied. (The posters all pictured the dangers of Communism. As an architecture enthusiast, I didn’t want all the churches pulled down either.) There was a communist candidate, who had poor personal hygiene, and had to be accompanied around – at a short distance – by bodyguards. Eventually the election was won by a late entrant, led by the school comedian, calling itself the ‘Intellectual Extremists’: slogan ‘Vote for Daddy’; which annoyed the headmaster no end. He’d instituted the election in order to instil civic responsibility in us boys. But it could be that ‘Daddy’s’ voters were pretty representative of the electorates we have today. It would explain Boris’s (temporary but disastrous) recent success.

Of course my views transitioned when I reached the Sixth form, and came to study History – Mediaeval, as it happens (Modern was for the dumdums, with the really bright doing Ancient), but it made me think; and I then went on to university, which, despite being almost all male and Public school dominated,  also proved to be a new multiracial environment for me to live in. So I could never be a racist. But of course most voters lack most of these advantages; and so cannot be blamed for having narrower views of the world.

Some of which, however, I really can relate to. It’s not hard to lose one’s patience with Parliament, with the voting system we have, its arcane practices, the corruption of various kinds, and in the light of last Wednesday’s shambolic vote on Israel-Gaza (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-68362405). I too get exasperated with various forms of what are called ‘wokishness’ or ‘political correctness’, especially when they give so much ammunition to the right-wing newspapers who delight in misrepresenting or exaggerating them out of all proportion to their real significance. I can sympathise with the resentment expressed by those who feel patronised by ‘intellectuals’, even when I think (some of) the intellectuals may be right. I’m suspicious of most governments, whether ‘permanent’ or not; although my suspicions point in a different direction from those of Liz Truss. I accept, reluctantly, that immigration has to be fairly regulated: although I would have missed my African and Asian friends at college. I suppose I’m Islamophobic, in the sense of deploring all fanatical forms of religion, in which guise Islam often presents itself today. I’m not too happy with demonstrators breaking things, though I wouldn’t accuse most of them of being motivated by ‘hate’ (that’s Suella again). Like those others who are unsettled by the huge societal changes taking place today, I’m often tempted to wrap myself in the warm blanket of nostalgia; although not of the imperial past that so many of today’s populists clearly miss more. (‘We used to rule half the world’.) I’m bored with the ‘trans’ debate, although that’s probably a failing of mine. (I should take more interest in gender.) Ditto the vexed question of ‘identity’, and the ’culture wars’ generally; but partly because I fear they are taking people’s attention away from what is truly ailing both them, and the planet.

This of course may be quite deliberate, on the part of the leaders of these ‘populist’ causes. But that’s another issue. I may come back to it in a later post.

Britain can be a very cruel country. One current example of this is the continued incarceration of Julian Assange, about whom I have blogged at length in the past; based partly on my expertise in secret service history, and partly on my familiarity with Sweden, where one crucial event in his recent career took place. (My last post on this was https://bernardjporter.com/2019/06/05/assanges-extraditions/. Search ‘Assange’ for the others.) A court is still deliberating on whether he should be extradited to the USA on ‘treason’ charges. In the meantime he is still languishing – it’s been five years now – in a British gaol.

A worse cruelty, however, in my view, is the one being meted out to Shamima Begum: originally a British citizen, who at the age of fifteen fled abroad from the East End of London to join ISIS, and was provided with ‘husbands’, to whom she bore at least three babies, all of whom died. Seeing – we presume – the error of her ways, and more immediately and clearly the awful conditions in which she was forced to live in a Syrian refugee camp, she tried to get back to her home; only to be refused entry by the Home Secretary of the day (no, it wasn’t Cruella Braverman, although I’m sure she would have approved), and then to have her British nationality taken from her; which meant that effectively she had no nationality at all. That is forbidden by international law; but the government argued that as her parents had come from Bangladesh, she still had the option of taking on Bangladeshi citizenship. Unfortunately Bangladesh wouldn’t allow her in; so she is still stuck in Syria, while her lawyers continue fighting her case in the UK. Today the last of their appeals was turned down by the Supreme Court; leaving only the European Court of Human Rights left to her. (Yes; that’s the Court that the Brexiters in the Tory party want Britain to withdraw from.) She has made it clear that she would accept a sentence of imprisonment in Britain. I imagine that, unlike Assange, she would love to languish in a British gaol. But there’s no chance of that, as things stand.

Of course we don’t know on what precise grounds the British government bases its case that she would be a danger to the country if she had her nationality restored. MI5/6 might have information we don’t. On the surface, however, it must be unlikely. She was a fifteen year-old girl, for pity’s sake, when she absconded: maybe attracted by the romance which ‘Arabia’ has long held for juveniles ever since TE Lawrence – the flowing robes, pure-white horses, shining scimitars, and all the rest – which must have put the cockney stallholders in rainy Bethnal Green in the shade. Alternatively, she could have been essentially sex-trafficked by unscrupulous Middle Easterners, to service those brave male terrorists, while her mind was barely formed. (You know what fifteen year-old girls are often like.) Or maybe she really did fall for the religion. Whatever it was, it’s clearly uncharitable, to say the least, not to say un-Christian, to visit these sins of adolescence on a grown-up young woman, and leave her little hope of escaping from their repercussions, ever. Or was it simply meant as a warning to other fifteen-year olds? 

It so happens that I know a woman who went through what must have been many of the same experiences as Ms Begum; but was welcomed back into Sweden afterwards, and has been a fine and productive citizen ever since. (She even published a book about it: see https://www.bokus.com/bok/9789113075556/alskade-terrorist-16-ar-med-militanta-islamister/.) That, I think, says more for my adopted country of Sweden, than you could say about Tory Britain just now.

It looks as though the two main issues on which the Tories intend to fight the next UK election, whenever that is (the precise date is in the gift of the prime minister), are (1) cross-Channel refugee immigration – ‘Stop the Boats!’; and (2) the so-called ‘Culture Wars’. Both are what you would expect of extreme Right-wing parties; but the Conservatives used to offer better than that. I’m thinking of Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan, RA Butler, Edward Heath, and latterly the much-missed Kenneth Clarke; but that entire ‘centrist’ tendency is now banished to the political wilderness, leaving Labour to occupy the ‘moderate’ ground the Tories have vacated.

You can see why the Tories are highlighting ‘the boats’ and ‘culture wars’. There’s nothing else for them. After fourteen years in office (five of them in coalition), their only positive achievement has been ‘getting Brexit done’; which used itself to be an ‘extremist’ position, and is losing its appeal currently. Otherwise they are widely perceived to have presided over fourteen years of failure to deal with the country’s real problems, topped off by five years of rancorous divisions, egregious scandals, those Covid ‘parties’, and farcical leadership. So now they can only – as Hillary Clinton once put it – ‘punch low’.

Hence the negativity that seems to be about to characterise both major English parties in the coming campaign. The Tories have now (this morning) unleashed another negative attack weapon, reaching back into their arsenal to revive the old ‘Labour anti-semitism’ smear again. We’ll see how that fares when it comes to the election. In the meantime, Labour has a whole array of negative targets – some of them referenced in the previous paragraph – to train their guns on. It could be too easy for them, if this releases them from the need to campaign with more positive policies. In that case this could be the most negative general election – on both sides – we have seen for years.

The USA is widely considered to be – or at least to have once been – an ‘imperialist’ power; and  deservedly so, as I’ve related in my book Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (2006). This is despite the protestations of many Americans; for after all weren’t they as a nation born of an anti-colonial revolt? That apparent contradiction – or hypocrisy – is unpicked in the book.

A few days ago, however, one prominent American, Erik Prince, ‘businessman, former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, and the founder of the private military company Blackwater’ (Wikipedia), came out of the closet, and not only admitted to the charge, but suggested that the US should ‘put the imperial hat back on’, and take over ‘countries around the world [which] are incapable of governing themselves’. This would include ‘pretty much all of Africa’, and much of South America too. Accused of being a neo-colonialist, he replied: ‘absolutely, yes.’ Colonialism he characterised as ‘a great concept’, and the answer to all today’s diplomatic ills. (See https://theintercept.com/2024/02/10/erik-prince-off-leash-imperialism-colonialism/.) – So there we have it: imperialism of the direct, formal, territorial sort stirring in the West once again. (After Russia’s and Israel’s to the east.) A red rag, you would think, to Leftist bulls everywhere.

Well yes, of course. But I do sometimes resile at how the mere words ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’ so often automatically provoke this kind of response on the Left, without an examination of the sorts of colonialism and imperialism that are meant. This was first suggested to me very early on in my career as a postgraduate historian researching into turn-of-the-20^th-century anti-imperialism, concentrating on the writer and economist John Atkinson Hobson, whose theory of ‘capitalist imperialism’ has remained the foundation for most anti-imperialist thinking ever since.

The European imperialism of his time, Hobson argued, whatever its avowed motives and rationales, had as its ‘tap-root’ (his term) the appetites of capitalists and capitalist countries for easy commercial profits in the less ‘developed’ world; and indeed not only their appetites, but also their needs, in the face of the diminishing domestic profit-margins which at that stage of capitalist development were threatening to bring the whole system down. So it was a kind of imperative; which is what attracted determinist Marxists like Lenin (Imperialism: The Last [or Latest] Stage of Capitalism) to the theory a little later on.

Hobson wasn’t a Marxist. He, like Keynes (another of his disciples), thought the problem could be solved with social democracy at home and liberal internationalism abroad. He also wasn’t against imperialism tout court, but only this modern version of it. If the colonial powers hadn’t taken over African countries, what would likely have been left would not be ‘free’ nations, but anarchy and indigenous tyranny, at least for a while. Slave-trading, for example, would have endured, but in the hands of the Arabs and African chiefs who had started it in the first place. This was why his sort of Radical favoured a more ‘enlightened’ form of European colonial rule, protecting the ‘natives’ from this kind of thing.

It was these men’s thinking (and one woman’s: she’s in my book too) that dominated the Leftist debate about ‘imperialism’ in Britain thereafter, in the minds and hands of – for example – the (socialist) Fabian Society, which published books about it, and of most other constructively-minded Leftists; and which substantially influenced Labour and Liberal government policies towards the colonies from 1924-on. (It was racist Tories, incidentally, who were the most overt anti-imperialists then, on the grounds that Africans and other ‘races’ were too fundamentally inferior to be worth bothering with.) It was this consideration that led me to change the title of my doctoral thesis (and later book) from The Anti-Imperialists, to Critics of Empire (1968; re-published 2008), which seemed to me to be more accurate, and fair.

What I liked and admired about my ‘Critics’, however, was the sophistication that informed their arguments, by contrast with the simplicities of much Leftist thinking about the subject today. Rejecting instant (but not ultimate) decolonisation, and resisting the idea that any form of external influence or sway over other peoples was illegitimate; and in addition rejecting the notion – still very potent on the Left – that nearly all the ills of the world could be blamed on the latter, they made room for an analysis of the political, economic and social relations between different peoples that was not necessarily ‘racist’ in the modern sense, or even patronising (although it often was that), and was usually far more sympathetic towards ‘alien’ cultures than the strict ‘anti-imperialist’ view of them was. What they mainly criticised was not ‘imperialism’ per se, but its capture by the ‘big’ capitalism which was the real villain of the piece. That was the basis, for example, of ED Morel’s and Mary Kingsley’s critique of probably the worst example of 19^th-century colonialism in Africa, which was Belgium’s ‘Congo Free State’: ‘free’ that is, for the rubber-farming capitalists, rather than for the horribly exploited Congolese.

Quite apart from this, imperialism could be benevolent, at least in the motives of some of its agents, and even occasionally beneficial, if only tangentially – look at the spread of cricket. This is demonstrably less true of ‘colonialism’, which is often confused with it, but is in fact a different creature, usually involving stealing people’s lands.

All of which is not to be blind to the atrocities committed in the names of both of these activities, and the flaws and evils that could – and often did – arise from even the ‘best’ of imperial motives. The point I’m making here is that the simple fact of something’s being tarred as ‘imperialist’ does not say all that could be said about – and against – it. We need to apply a more discriminating glass to it; to ‘deconstruct’ it, in every case. Not that I think that Erik Prince is likely to be exonerated by this – I wouldn’t trust his version of America imperialism – but it’s worth bearing in mind.

According to his tax return, revealed yesterday (to show he was paying tax), Rishi Sunak earned £2.2 million last year. ‘Earned’? That seems an odd word to use, for an income coming mainly from investments; and taxed at a lower rate than most of us Brits have to pay. Rishi is probably the richest prime minister Britain has ever had, with an even richer wife, apparently, and an immensely privileged background (Winchester College); now ruling over a country where the average person’s income is £28,000 – nowhere near enough, of course, to pay for a Public School education.

Keir Starmer alluded to this indirectly (if somewhat waspishly) the other day in Parliament, only for his intervention to be characterised by Sunak as embodying the ‘politics of envy’. Now, I don’t know about anyone else; but for my part I’m not at all ‘envious’ of his wealth, getting along as I do quite comfortably on a pension of about £25,000 a year – all really ‘earned’ – and not wanting anything more that an extra £2 millions-odd would buy for me. (Of course, if I still had children with me I might need a little more.) I’m just concerned that this £2 millions a year is going to him, rather than to society as a whole. Perhaps some of it is, in the form of charity. But still the disparity seems grotesque. And even dangerous, in Sunak’s present job: putting him in a situation where he can’t possibly empathise with the people he’s meant to be leading. That’s apparent from almost every word he speaks.

Maybe we need more of the ‘politics of envy’ to counter this. And even a law disqualifying the ultra-rich from public office. (You can put your own upper limit to it.) Perhaps America could do with the same. But then there might be no Presidential candidates left.

Well, I shouldn’t have worried. (See my previous post.) The book came through, and on the appointed day. Of course it may still have been the Israel/Palestine issue that very marginally delayed it; viz those ‘related items’. But I could have  been over-suspicious over this – even ‘paranoid’.

On the other hand, a measure of paranoia is surely excusable in this case. The book is Weaponising Anti-Semitism. How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, by Asa Winstanley (O/R Books, New York, 2023); and it chronicles the dirty tricks that what is called the ‘Israel Lobby’ got up to in Britain against supporters of the Palestine cause. Those supporters of course were not necessarily or even mainly the ‘anti-semites’ that most Zionists, including their propagandists, painted them as, using this as their main ‘weapon’; and of course a highly effective one, in view of the Jews’ long historical experience of anti-semitism, and its abhorrence to most liberal Europeans and Americans; so that being called an anti-semite now is almost on the level of being called a paedophile. It is this that makes philo-semites (like me) uncomfortable and nervous of criticising Israel’s policies in Gaza currently. This may be what the avowed ‘anti-anti-semites’ genuinely believe. If not, however, they are being indescribably wicked.

The trick may have worked. Certainly the reputation of the Labour Party as a particularly anti-semitic one, which was a total lie (see the book, and also https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/check-evidence/), was immensely damaging, and is still hanging around the party’s neck today. (I heard the generally reasonable James O’Brien repeating it in his podcast only a few days ago.) It’s one of those gross libels that is likely to outlive the truth; as many libels do, like the old one about King Canute. (He didn’t think he could hold back the tide.) And it’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to try to combat. That, and the idea of an ‘Israel Lobby’, which seems to imply the kind of ‘conspiracy’ of which Jews themselves have been accused for centuries. (Viz the ‘blood libel’, and their supposed part in fomenting the First World War.) The ‘Israel Lobby’ could be just another of those anti-semitic ‘conspiracy theories’, which no respectable person – certainly no scholar, like me – could openly avow. It puts him or her in the ‘tin foil hat’ brigade, together with flat earthers, moon landing deniers and nutters like David Icke.

In this way, denial of anti-semitism can be presented as a form of anti-semitism itself; especially when expressed by critics of Israel’s policies in the ‘occupied territories’, and even when Jews themselves come out on the other side – defending Corbyn, for example. One of these was the distinguished historian of British Jewry Professor Geoffrey Alderman, who knew and worked with Corbyn in his north London constituency, and so had a very different slant on him. And it should be remembered that not all Jews are Zionists, and many hold the Zionists’ territorial ambitions to be fundamentally un-Jewish. The Zionist term for them is ‘self-hating Jews’.

In these ways Israel has a peculiarly privileged position when it comes to debating its policies, and even its very existence as a state. Established on lands stolen from others, its legitimacy has always been questioned. The words ‘colonial’, ‘racist’ and ‘apartheid’ – highly unfashionable today – are often applied to its domestic policies; quite accurately, as it seems to an imperial historian like me. In my (personal) view, however, this should not be thought to justify its abolition as a nation, as Hamas apparently wants. Nations are created in many different ways, and most other countries on earth – the USA included – have been founded on a degree of territorial theft. We can’t undo all of these. But it should surely make Israelis more aware of the injustices that helped to create their nation relatively recently – that makes a difference – and willing to compromise with their non-Jewish inhabitants and neighbours as a result.

The Gaza invasion – however provoked – and its brutal continuance will have done nothing to make Israel safer; and runs the huge risk of alienating many in the wider world who, like me, were sensitive to the sufferings of the Jewish people, and supported them as history’s great victims; but may no longer be able to do so when the Israelis become oppressors too. This has nothing to do with anti-semitism, but rather the opposite: disappointment that people’s pro-semitism has been so betrayed. And resentment at how, in the course of this,  the charge of anti-semitism has been – to use Winstanley’s term – so ‘weaponised’.