Porter’s Pensées

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’.

Three days ago I ordered a book from Amazon UK, to be sent to me here in Stockholm. The transaction went through, and I was promised delivery on 6th February. This morning however I received a message informing me that the package had been ‘delayed at Customs’, and was being ‘processed by Customs officials.’ (Whose customs officials? British or Swedish? It wasn’t made clear.)

The message continued: ‘UPS may require additional information from you.’ It also provided a link for ‘More info’, which however merely told me of ‘Products related to items in your shipment’. The main ones cited there were Palestinian flag badges. The only connexion between these and the book I had ordered was that the latter was about the so-called ‘weaponising of Anti-Semitism’, in order to undermine the then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who of course is a champion of the Palestinian cause. I’ve written about that issue on this blog before (e.g. https://bernardjporter.com/2020/02/22/the-jacobin-and-the-anti-semitic-scandal/). I still feel pretty cross about it. Hence my interest in the book.

It’s by Asa Winstanley. It purports to be based on solid research, and to be strictly factual. I obviously haven’t been able to read it yet, so can’t comment on its reliability. But it worries me that its shipment might have been delayed for political reasons; a form of censorship, in effect. Of course I may still receive it, with an apology, within the next few days. I’ll let you know if so.

I’ve asked around Facebook if any other ‘Brits in Sweden’ have experienced this sort of thing. Delays in UK-EU post have got much worse since Brexit. But as I understood it, this was simply in order to assess any import duties that might be owed. The ‘related items’ that Amazon (or UPS) have cited to me suggests that this is not the case here.

What is the ‘great divide’ in British and other nations’ politics just now? It used to be Catholic vs. Protestant; then Monarchical vs. Republican; then Capitalist vs. Socialist – with doubtless other lesser ‘divides’ in between. You were either on the one side, or on the other; the notion of a ‘divide’ being symbolised, in the British case, by the adversarial seating arrangement of the House of Commons. (Other nations’ parliaments are generally U-shaped, allowing for gradations of opinion.) Today the major ‘divide’ in Britain could be Brexiter vs. Remainer/Rejoiner; but that one may be short-lived. The ‘Élite’ vs. the ‘common people’ is a more constant one; but with élitists changing their clothes – and even their shapes – for every generation. The idea of ‘wokery’ is being currently offered up as a crucial touch-stone, and one that British Conservatives are anxious to exploit; but with the disadvantages that (a) it is difficult to pin down, and (b) few people on the ‘woke’ side define themselves as such. The word is much more generally used as a vague insult.

Which brings us on to what may be a more crucial divide in British and American society and politics, but one that we ‘intellectuals’ are highly nervous of expressing. That’s the one based on ‘intelligence’: with populations crucially divided between the wise and the stupid; or, to put it less crudely – and surely more justifiably – depending on their levels and types of education. I’ve quoted in an earlier blog (https://bernardjporter.com/2023/09/19/books-and-politics/) Rory Stewart’s observation – Stewart was a Conservative MP, but one of the better ones – that ‘campaigning… in Cumbria, I began to notice that if a house was filled with books, the occupants would not be voting Conservative’. That almost says it all. Except that even well-educated Tories, however much they might disagree with the prejudices of the hoi polloi (yes, I know that the hoi means the, so it’s superfluous there: but then I’m one of those élitists), can still, if they are really clever, and unprincipled to boot, work on those prejudices to garner support among the less educated for their own political ends. Look at the lies about the EU that Boris Johnson the journalist used to churn out in his role as Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s. That’s assuming that he didn’t really believe them. (Unless an Eton education means nothing at all.)

But of course we can’t say this, from our rarified intellectual height, for fear of further stoking the anti-intellectualist prejudice that lies on the other side of the ‘divide’, and so weakening our cause. We know from social surveys that voting in the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum did depend to a large extent on levels of education, with the university-educated being far more likely to vote to remain in the EU than those with shorter educations (https://www.statista.com/statistics/572613/brexit-votes-by-education/). That was certainly a factor. But we can’t mention it. It’s almost the opinion – stupidity – that (to misquote Oscar Wilde’s lover) ‘dare not speak its name’.

And nor should we. We can’t infer from this that less-educated Brexit voters were simply stupid. Education doesn’t necessarily guarantee greater intelligence; only (in most cases) superior knowledge. What we might see as ‘stupidity’ covers a range of conditions. One of them is vulnerability to propaganda, which might be due more to the propagandists’ skills, and to the agencies they can rely on to spread their versions of events, than to one’s own mental deficiencies. In Britain the ownership of the Press was obviously a big factor in the dissemination of anti-EU views in the years before 2016. If your only sources of national news then were the Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph or the Sun, as they were for many people, it will have been difficult for them to come to alternative views.

That may have been aggravated by the failures of education, in many schools and colleges, to inculcate critical thinking in their pupils, as distinct from mere ‘knowledge’. Classes in critical thinking could do an awful lot to train up a thoughtful democracy. My own subject of History is particularly conducive to this approach. But there are others. One of my children was taught this in her Australian school by analysing and comparing one day’s newspaper reports of the same event. How much of this sort of thing goes on in British or American schools? (I have no means of knowing.) It could narrow the unfortunate ‘divide’ between the so-called intelligent and the apparently stupid.

Of course this is not meant to imply that all Brexiters, or Conservatives, or Republicans, are presently stupid. Or that all of us on the other side are brighter than them. Many of our opinions are ‘stupid’ as well: much ‘wokery’ for example. And there are rational and critical versions of Conservatism and Republicanism around. It’s just that the ‘stupid’ – or uncritical – side of the ‘great divide’ seems so dominant today. And mainly on the Right.

Religion doesn’t always have to be maleficent. I’m sure it can be valuable when it preaches a ‘good’ morality, and as a comfort to those confused and distressed by the complexities of everyday human life, or by mere contemplation of – for example – the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. Gods are something to hold on to; to make sense of things. But they must be Gods we choose. In other words, religion must always be personal, and not insisted upon by higher powers.

I think the ancient Greeks, Romans and Nordics had it about right when they posited a multiplicity of Gods, representing different values, and rival claims. The rot began with the rise of monotheism – ‘thou shalt have no other gods but me’ – which, as I understand it, was the distinctive contribution of Judaism. (I may be wrong about that.) Both Christianity and Islam took this on. It seemed simpler and more rational than the comic book cast of flawed super-heroes favoured previously by most religions, and consequently was easier to swallow.

But there were downsides. One was that non-believers in your particular ‘I am the Lord thy God’ could be cast as heretics, and so oppressed. (I don’t think anyone was oppressed for not believing in Odin or Mithras. Again, I may be wrong.) That gave rise to – or at least was used to justify – conquest. The more humane alternative to conquest was proselytism, by people like – in my scholarly field – the missionary-explorer David Livingstone, whose chief motive was to bring poor benighted Africans into the embrace of everybody’s loving God. (He broadly failed, by the way.) In the case of Judaism – which I believe is not a proselytising religion – it emphasised the special situation of people born as Jews as the ‘chosen people’ of God. That of course was supposed to mark them off from other peoples, and in a way to privilege them. It also gave them something of a ‘tribal’ identity; repeated more loosely in other religiously-defined groups, like the Catholic and Protestant ‘tribes’ of Northern Ireland, and various ‘racial’ communities all over the world. At the root of all these enterprises was this insistence that there was only one God, yours; allegiance to whom trumped every other consideration.

This was exacerbated when religions became organised, with sacred texts, creeds, holy days, hierarchies and forms of worship, meeting collectively in churches, mosques, temples or synagogues, and in many cases identified with actual or putative nations, which gave them a political clout that a merely personal religious faith could never wield. It is these forms of religion that have, broadly speaking, caused (or bolstered) so much of the harm in history that is often attributed to religion pur, but is really mainly the fault of the organised, proselytising and monotheistic sort.

That’s enough about God. You’ll have realised that I’m no theologian. Back down to earth next time, now that I’m back to proper blogging.

Quite apart from its human and political aspects, now well known after the ITV drama-documentary series Mr Bates versus the Post Office – which incidentally I can’t get up here in Sweden (any ideas, anyone?), but fully expect SVT to broadcast eventually – the Great UK Post Office Scandal must have the effect of disillusioning people about computer systems in general; one of which is the real original villain of this piece. Writing personally, I’m now wondering whether HMRC’s repeated demands on me for £1000+ in unpaid taxes – when I can’t understand and am not being told how on earth I can possibly owe this amount (my income from pensions being very small, and nearly all of it PAYE) – might not also be due to a computer glitch at their end. I won’t bore you with details (there’s nothing more tedious than other people’s tax affairs); except to say that several long letters to the tax authorities, detailing my situation, have been met with not a single response of any kind, not even ‘Computer says no’; adding to my belief that HMRC is now entirely staffed by machines, without a single human being among them. Are they supplied by Fujitsu too?

And of course this kind of distrust will probably be taken to justify right-wing Americans’ suspicions of their famous ‘Dominion’ voting machine, on which US elections now seem increasingly to rely.

Human society relies on ‘trust’. Donald and Boris have done a lot to erode that. Now the machines are joining in. It’s almost Science Fiction.

2023 has been a dreadful year: for the millions caught up in wars, obviously; but also in a far less catastrophic way for those of us in safer situations who are interested in politics, but without far-Right proclivities. The political Right – in the forms of ‘populism’, authoritarianism, nationalism, amoralism, anti-‘wokery’, and proto- or neo-‘Fascism’ – seems to have become the dominant and even fashionable current of the day; surprisingly to those of us who had been ensnared by the lazy liberal-progressive assumptions of the post-war years, and could not credit that men like Trump and Farage (and women like Braverman and Truss) could be taken seriously ever again. It has been a shocking engagement with the cold reality of – I would say – a virtually untamed global capitalist civilisation at its latest stage of development, and possibly – although I hope not, for fear of what may come after – in its death throes.

For me personally it has been a pretty low year, of physical and mental decline, whose nadir was a period in a UK hospital where a misdiagnosis resulted in terrible pain, until they put it right, but no righter than I was before I went in. Returning home I was put on several waiting lists for my various (non life-threatening) ailments, none of which however came with a definite date for a doctor’s appointment, which I was led to believe I would have to wait months for. That can be attributed to the dire situation that the UK National Health Service is in just now; due, of course, to Conservative government parsimony (and ideology), which may itself be a function of capitalism’s progress/decline. So a few weeks ago I upped and left England in order to benefit from my other citizenship, in Sweden, which has a functioning health service still. There I was granted appointments almost immediately.

I may stay here for good, with my beloved ‘sambo’ (partner) Kajsa, and for the first time a ‘room of my own’ (feminists will recognise the reference), which I can work in. I have various ideas for a short book and articles, but not (yet) the ‘get up and go’ attitude that will sustain them into print. Kajsa is still being asked to give lectures and classes at Stockholm University; which is encouraging at her (our) age. Maybe death isn’t the only thing worth living for in one’s eighties. I, on the other hand, seem to have dropped out of everyone’s reckoning – universities, the LRB’s review editors; the whole world of scholarship. I’m now passé. Hopefully my books aren’t.

More cheerfully: we’ve been summer holidaying as usual on Svartsö, with my children and grandchildren, as well as Kajsa’s. We’ve planned trips abroad – to the Baltic States, for example; but Covid, my relative immobility and the danger of a Russian invasion there have put us off that. Next spring, perhaps. My house in Hull is being looked after by our Ukrainian refugee family, who are getting it free, but at well worth the cost to me, by giving me the peace of mind I can never get when I leave the house empty. They are a real boon; lovely, sad people all four of them. I so much hope that they can return to a free Ukraine eventually. But not for my sake, of course. – I would have put up Palestinians; but the authorities don’t seem so protective towards them. We all know why.

Maybe 2024 will be better? It’s clearly going to be a crucial year, with several important national elections coming on. The UK one looks promising for Labour – although not my favourite variety of Labour. The coming US Presidential elections, on the other hand, look rather more alarming. Will the world survive another spell of Trump: almost the perfect personification, incidentally, of end-of-the-road capitalism?