Porter’s Pensées

Back in Sweden now, and appreciating the far superior health care here; at least for citizens with non-life-threatening ailments. I’m on three or four separate waiting lists in Hull, all of them several months long already, and with no indication of when I’ll be seen; which is one of the reasons why I fled here. You pay about £20 for each appointment or series of appointments, and various amounts for prescriptions, up to a certain (low) maximum in the year; after which it’s all free. That seems a fair compromise. And doctors here spend far more time with you than they do in the UK – half an hour today with my super young (female) doc. I’m having a kind of bodily MOT next week: blood, heart, scans, etc. After which I’ll know whether I’m (a) really ill, (b) just old, or (c) a hypochondriac.

Of course the ‘NHS crisis’ in Britain is partly deliberate on the part of the present government. Despite protestations to the contrary, they really don’t like the whole ‘socialist’ system, and would rather it were transferred to private enterprise, as in the USA. My suffering – such as it is – is constantly exacerbated by adverts offering immediate appointments with private doctors, who are slavering over the carcase of our beloved NHS like wolves. That’s how the counter-revolution will sneak up on us. I’m lucky – with my dual citizenship – to be able to escape what for me would be a morally difficult and perhaps even deadly choice.

Incidentally: conclusive proof that God is a woman. She only gave prostates to men.

Serious (political) blogging will resume when I’ve settled in again; and hopefully with a clean-ish bill of health.]       

The dire condition into which my country has fallen – what or whomever you wish to blame for it: Covid, Russia, Brexit, the Conservative government, earlier Labour governments, the decline of capitalism, the loss of the Empire, the Public schools, trade unions, workshy workers, immigrants, Boris, Liz, Rishi, or just bad luck – can hardly be said to have affected me personally: except in one way. Our once great National Health Service – underfunded, and understaffed since Brexit took our European nurses and doctors away – seems to be on its last legs, due for the knacker’s yard before very long; so that now we all have to suffer, die or ‘go private’ (which of course is what the Conservatives want) when we’re poorly, rather than being looked after socially, which should be the norm in any civilised state. And just when I – personally – need it most.

Just look at these figures, put out by the British Medical Association, no less (https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-workforce/pressures/nhs-backlog-data-analysis). A ‘record high’ hospital waiting list of 7.77 million appointments, consisting of approximately 6.5 million individual patients waiting for treatment; nearly 3.29 million of them waiting over 18 weeks, and around 391,000 waiting for over a year. It so happens that I represent three of those patients, still waiting to be examined and treated for three different medical conditions (I’m not telling you what they are), and without any definite appointments for any of them. My doctor’s surgery, which used to be fine, is now struggling under the strain. My son Ben (bless him) has offered to pay for me to go private: that would get me into hospital and into the hands of a money-minded doctor within a few days; but he’s aware of, and clearly respects, my prejudice against that.

I might have given in regardless – I’m really not in very good nick just now – if it weren’t for another card I have up my sleeve; which is my joint Swedish citizenship (taken out, you may recall, after the Brexit referendum), which will enable me to be treated in Stockholm. In fact I’m off back there, and to my excellent svensk läkare Sara, in a couple of weeks’ time. She, and the Swedish health system, should put me right.

But of course I’m lucky, far more privileged than most of my British semi-compatriots in this regard. Few of them can escape abroad. Nonetheless, the abject decline of our NHS has a wider significance than just for me. I was always immensely proud of it: patriotically, you might say. Now it’s under siege by the Goths and Vandals: aka the ‘neo-liberals’, or ‘Thatcherites’. When the NHS has finally gone, there will be very little left to attach me emotionally to my country of birth. I may stay in Sweden; at least until the next election. Will a Labour government under Keir Starmer bring our beloved NHS back to us? It was originally Labour’s creation, after all. Or will it be too late?

Well, OK; and of course it’s flattering for a professional historian like me to think so. At the very least it should boost the sales of our books, and our sense of superior wisdom. History isn’t only fun, but is also educative, useful, and indeed – if this familiar quotation is right – essential to the progress of humankind.

So far so good. What a noble band of men and women we are: working diligently to reveal the past in order to serve the future, and so to make for a better world! If only more people would take notice of us; would read my British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t, for example, and learn the lessons contained there. The real lessons, that is; which are not always the simplistic ones that are usually drawn from the past:  facile comparisons between Hitler and Saddam Hussein, for example (to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003); and the many British imperial ones that are targeted in that last-named book of mine.

This in fact is one of the dangers of studying – or at least reading – history for present enlightenment. We can easily get it wrong. The popularisers of history invariably do; especially those with political agendas, like Sir Jacob Rees Mogg (The Victorians. Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain). But we professionals are also bound to make mistakes, more or less often; for the historical runes are nearly always difficult to read, confused and complicated, and hedged in by context, which requires further and deeper research; and so are hardly ever self-evident. And that’s before our own preferences, slants and prejudices – born of present times, our social or national identities, and our personal inclinations – are factored in. This is why there is so much debate and disagreement among us ‘proper’ historians. Most of us have doubts. I’m not sure that I’m right about many of things I’ve researched and written about. But isn’t that – doubt – in the nature of academic research in most fields? And in fact a crucial path towards – even if it never reaches it – historical ‘truth’?

This must be frustrating for those of our readers who want and expect clearer answers to emerge from our (usually expensively state-financed) studies. But at least we can do two useful things. The first is point out obvious and possibly dangerous errors in the popular versions of history. (Errors can be established in a way truths rarely can.) The second is to reveal the crucial complexity of history. With any luck that could encourage our readers to be more aware of the complexities of their own societies and polities; which is probably the most valuable practical ‘lesson’ that can be drawn from a study of history, and a way of avoiding being ‘doomed to repeat it’, in the way that George Santayana (as I’ve been told) warned us against with that quote. What this teaches us is to be careful of the kind of history we are seeking enlightenment from, and not to expect too much from it, even if it’s the ‘best’ kind (e.g. mine).

But beyond that, there’s also an argument for saying that any sort of historical awareness is likely to do more harm than good in most situations, if folk rely on it too much. People, communities and nations are not the products of their histories; or, at least, not as much as they are of the situations they find themselves in their present times. Too much history can injure and even destroy the relations between peoples; as they did during the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ of the last century, and are still doing in the Israel-Hamas war of the present time. Of course rival historical memories and myths were not the sole causes of these conflicts; but they undoubtedly aggravated them. If they could be forgotten, excised from the minds of the participants (especially the Zionists’ ludicrous claim that God – no less – had promised Palestine to them all those years ago), then Protestants, Catholics, Arabs and Jews would still have things to divide them and fight about; but their problems might be easier to solve. In both these cases, ‘history’, good and bad, has been a deeply maleficent force. It is history that is ‘dooming’ us; not the lack of it. Which may seem an odd argument from a professional historian – but there it is.

As an imperial historian, I think I know what ‘colonialism’ looks like. In my review of a book about the Mau Mau emergency of the 1950s, an early draft of which appeared here (https://bernardjporter.com/2023/11/09/kenya-book-review/), I hinted – very marginally – at a comparison between Britain’s colonising of Kenya in the 19^th and 20th centuries, provoking the savagery of Mau Mau and the reaction on the part of the imperial government that followed it; and, on the other hand, Israel’s seizure and settlement of parts of Palestine after 1948, with its recent and equally terrible aftermath. I believe this to be a fair parallel in many ways, which places both events in a useful context. On receiving a proof of the article yesterday, however, I found that that short sentence of mine had been excised.

The present Israeli authorities, of course, dislike words like ‘colonialism’, ‘imperialism’, ‘apartheid’ and ‘racism’ being applied to the Zionist project, even regarding them – or pretending to – as ‘anti-semitic’; which I, in common with many liberal Israeli and diaspora Jews, regard as a monstrous slur. But I’m wondering whether anticipation of this sort of criticism might have had a bearing on this minor instance of censorship by the Literary Review? On the other hand, it might just have been that the latter’s copy-editors felt the reference to Israel was irrelevant. Fair enough, perhaps; but it prevents my making a good point.

I’ve written to the editor to try to have the offending words reinstated. I’ll see – and pass on – what she replies.

*

[Here’s the relevant passage of the original. The Wambugu quote was also cut; together with one or two other quite innocent references.

…This is despite the principled opposition of many on the Left and liberal-Conservative sides of British metropolitan politics, as well as of a few of the more decent settlers; and the generous acknowledgement much later from one ex-inmate, Wambugu wa Nyingi, of the ‘many good things’ that ‘the British’ had also done in Kenya. (I wonder whether many Palestinians, to cite a superficial modern parallel, would say the same of their Israeli colonists.)]

If Suella Braveman is thinking of using today’s sacking to release her inner fascist, she would be in strong historical company. Fascism (or quasi-fascism, or extreme nationalism, or whatever else you want to call it) is usually thought of as a predominantly masculine – even macho – ideology. Watching the demonstrations in London on TV on Saturday I couldn’t help noticing that the Right-wing ‘counter-protest’ crowd – the one that did all the violence – was overwhelmingly made up of men and boys, rather resembling soccer hooligans; whereas the main 300,000-strong pro-Palestine demonstration – the one that Braverman characterised as a ‘hate march’ – was, as well as being peaceful and indeed pacifist, pretty balanced gender-wise.

If Suella wants to lead the Conservative Right in the future – even perhaps in a breakaway party, if Sunak and the new ‘Lord’ Cameron prove to be too ‘wokish’ for her – she might do worse than to model herself on Rotha Lintorn-Orman. She was the founder of the first British – and the only female-led – explicitly ‘Fascist’ party in 1923. (Google her. Very odd. Rather ‘butch’ in appearance; which might have been a gesture to her fellow masculinists. Suella might need to trim her flowing locks.)

I’ve been busy over the last week reading this book for review. (I really do read, thoroughly, the books I’m sent!) Here’s the latest draft. – Now, hopefully, to get back to proper blogging, in between hospital appointments.

Nicholas Rankin, Trapped in History: Kenya, Mau Mau and Me. Faber, November 2023; 560pp, illust., £25.

Reviewed by Bernard Porter.

Kenya is now generally acknowledged to represent the worst of all the criminal enterprises that helped form the British empire in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and especially in the 1950s, when the colony underwent an ‘Emergency’ – others would call it a war – that was so unrivalled in its savagery that afterwards the British government sought to spirit away most of the official documentation on it to a highly secret archive in Buckinghamshire. (It was a legal case instituted by former African victims in the 2010s that prised it open eventually.) The government at the time, and a public opinion informed by the right-wing press, attributed the whole affair to the innate barbarism of an African organisation known as Mau Mau, whose atrocities both shocked and thrilled readers brought up on popular imperialist and ‘Western’ novels and films. These were genuine. Mau Mau administered dark ‘oaths’ reinforced by bloody rituals, and slaughtered – often ghoulishly – men, women and children, both white and native (if they were seen as ‘collaborators’, or simply refused the oaths). White settlers lived in terror of these monsters, who at any moment could emerge from the forests, dressed in animal skins and paint, to slay them in their beds. Apparently the Mau Mau could ‘smell their victims out’ from two miles away. ‘Only’ twenty-odd settlers were murdered in this way, as against thousands of Africans shot and hanged in reprisal; but the shock was well-founded. It was even worse when the movement was suspected – as most protest movements were in this paranoid age – as being Soviet backed.

The other way of regarding Mau Mau was as an extreme and deplorable but nonetheless understandable response to the equally undoubted crimes of the white colonists; first of all in stealing their best lands from the Africans, and then in subjecting them to appallingly racist treatment as servants and hired hands on their farms. Racism in Kenya appears to have been worse than in most other British colonies, and certainly worse than in Britain itself, possibly because of the distinctive social class – and public school education – of so many of the whites who went out there. (Both Eton and Winchester, for example, crop up in this account. Not may Etonians went to other colonies.) The social lives of these reprobates has become familiar to us through films such as The Happy Valley (1986) and White Mischief (1987). This was the society that the four year-old Nicholas Rankin’s family joined in 1954, at the height of the ‘Emergency’, staying on until 1963, when Uhuru (freedom) was finally won; and the family returned ‘home’, with Nicholas enrolled at his own public school (Shrewsbury).

The Kenya Emergency has virtually a library devoted to it now, most of it focussing on the repression meted out to Mau Mau detainees in the ‘camps’, which the American historian Caroline Elkins has characterised as Britain’s Gulag (2005). Strictly speaking they were ‘concentration camps’; but that term conjures up unfair comparisons today. Nonetheless the Kenya camps were pretty vile, inflicting the most horrendous tortures on detainees, up to and including castrating men and inserting hot eggs into women’s vaginas – you can see why they hid the evidence; which will always sully the historical reputation of British colonialism. This is despite the principled opposition of many on the Left and liberal-Conservative sides of British metropolitan politics, as well as of a few of the more decent settlers; and the generous acknowledgement much later from one ex-inmate, Wambugu wa Nyingi, of the ‘many good things’ that ‘the British’ had also done. (I wonder whether many Palestinians, to cite a superficial modern parallel, would say the same of their Israeli colonists.)

Rankin’s book is an invaluable addition to this library, written as it is from the unusual perspective of a lad planted down in this privileged white community, and accepting its assumptions and racial prejudices initially – and also Shrewsbury’s – as young boys are almost bound to do; but managing to free himself from them in later life. ‘I am sorry’, he writes near the end, that ‘I was part of the torture all around us’. To do him justice he didn’t see the worst of it, sheltered as he was in his English home (apart from the Kikuyu servants), and at his very English-style prep school; but he got to know about it later, and as a result took the trouble to research the prior history of colonial Kenya. That helped him – and now his readers – to put the Emergency in context, and makes up a good third of this book. He also has some sad reflections on the later history of independent Kenya, betrayed, he thinks, by Jomo Kenyatta, whose dreams for a social-democratic post-colonial nation – clearly modelled on contemporary Britain, where he studied and won his PhD – turned to dust.

Rankin also has some interesting things to say about racism generally, including in Britain (this all happened in Enoch Powell’s time), which his Kenyan experience has convinced him has more to do with power, and the fear of its loss, than with ‘race’ per se. He muses on this towards the end; after a section on an imagined encounter with a puff-adder.

‘I have built this book, a papier-mâché memory palace, partly out of what I remember of my own small part of the worldwide British Empire. But in the end, I find snakes coiled inside the house of paper. It is not the snake of racism, but the bigger snake of a hunger for power. Enjoying power over somebody else, fearing to lose it, and then going further, is the path to terror and torture. Terror and torture were widespread in Mau Mau Kenya on both sides, and they lived inside me too.’

Hopefully writing this semi-autobiographical, semi-historical, semi-political and immensely readable account of his colonial boyhood, has helped to exorcise these demons.

In 1957 Ian Fleming’s brother, Peter, published a novel called The Sixth Column, which I read in the ’seventies because I was researching the field of espionage history at the time. It turned out to be very disappointing (by comparison with the ‘Bond’ books, which I devoured eagerly – didn’t everyone?), and incredibly reactionary in its politics. I can’t remember the main plot, set in the near future; but that didn’t seem to matter to Peter Fleming so much as the underlying but persistent theme of the Decline of Britain since World War II; which the author attributed to the nation’s ‘softening up’ by – yes, you’ve guessed it – Labour governments, the welfare state, and what today would be called ‘woke’ ideas. Foreign intervention also came into it, with the Commies (of course) infiltrating a popular TV presenter into the BBC in order to demoralise British youth with his trivial and jokey spiel, and pop music. As I read the book, Terry Wogan (remember him?) came irresistibly to my mind, although The Sixth Column predated him by a couple of decades.

What brought this back to my mind was the England cricket team’s defeat (albeit in the shorter form of the game) by Afghanistan a few days ago. At the end of Peter Fleming’s book, news comes in that the English cricket team has lost to ‘West Africa’; which is taken to be a disgrace – England beaten by black ex-colonials! – and a sure sign, therefore, of her final descent into the abyss.

Personally, I’ve always regarded the global spread of cricket through the world as one of the greatest and most beneficial contributions of British imperialism (perhaps its only one) to civilisation; and often feel a little glow of pride when England is beaten by the West Indies, or Pakistan, or (currently) India. So imperialism wasn’t all bad, then.

*

OK, that’s a trivial comment. I should be writing about more important things: the real decline of Britain at the hands of these almost unbelievably stupid and incompetent Tories (perhaps Terry Wogan got to them); neo-fascism; Ukraine; Palestine; knife-crime in Stockholm; global warming; the eventual destruction of our galaxy… I hope to post about some of these later. In the meantime, however, I still have some more medical procedures to go through; in England unfortunately – I really should have stayed in Sweden – starting tomorrow. Nothing life-threatening, I hope. But mildly embarrassing, which is why I haven’t been more specific.

I’m no expert on present-day Israel/Palestine, although as a British imperial historian I do know something about the origins of the current crisis there. That expertise has persuaded me that some of the charges levelled against the current Israeli state – charges resented by Israel’s defenders, and even characterised by them as ‘anti-Semitic’ – are in fact incontrovertibly true, and certainly not necessarily racist; and so should be accepted as ‘givens’ on both (or all) sides of the argument.

One is that Palestine was essentially stolen from its former occupants by the Zionists, who had no legitimate right to it, therefore, apart from the rights that military conquest gives to an aggressor. Unless, that is, you believe that ‘God’ gave it to them two thousand years before; which of course can carry very little weight for anyone who doesn’t accept the particular God that the Jews have chosen as their own. A second charge is that Zionism was an essentially ‘colonialist’ and even ‘imperialist’ enterprise; so offending against present-day prejudices against both these phenomena, and yet – I would say – undeniably accurate, again. Zionism, as it has worked out in Palestine, bears just about every single characteristic of 19^th century colonialism (enabled as it was by early 20^th-century British imperialists like Arthur Balfour); and is still, under Netanyahu, expansionary in much the same way. The only substantial difference I can see is that it doesn’t seem to embrace the ‘civilizing mission’ aspect of many European imperialisms (including Balfour’s), which were justified (often hypocritically, but still…) by the benefits they were supposed to bring to the indigènes. There’s little sign of that in present-day Israel-Palestine; and least of all in the over-populated Gaza Strip, whose economy and life have been strangled for years by Israel. Zionism is also quite explicitly ‘racist’, or at least ‘culturist’, as historic colonialism generally was too. And its implementation does bear comparison with South African apartheid, that most despised feature of European imperialism (after slavery); although I don’t know enough about life in present-day Israel to know how far that parallel should be taken. But all in all there can be no doubt that Israel is – among other things, to be sure – a ‘colonialist’ state; as of course many other countries – Britain and the US not excepted – have been at one time or another in their histories, if you go back far enough.

Some of this, of course, lies behind Hamas’s latest horrific assault on Israel from Gaza; helping to explain it on some levels, if not to excuse it. In fact nothing can excuse the ferocity of this indiscriminate and murderous onslaught, by all accounts – if, that is, those accounts are reliable, and not just propaganda. (There’s good evidence for a lot of them.) No historical grievances can justify such a massacre in any circumstances.

But then the same must surely apply to Israel’s new counter-assault on Gaza, which appears to be as destructive in terms of the numbers of innocent lives struck down there as was Hamas’s. The Israeli response also seems to be motivated by revenge at least as much as by the strict needs of defence. Could this be a religious thing: based, for example, on the Old Testament morality of ‘an eye for an eye’ (the awful Leviticus, of course, ch. 24 vv. 19-21), and probably Islam’s too? This is why, incidentally, I’ve always preferred the rather more wokeish New Testament morality (Matthew 5:38-39) over theirs. I can fully understand the Israelis’ eagerness for retribution. But’s that’s the primitive, emotional, Old Testament side of me.

Netanyahu is using this event to justify hitting the Palestinians even harder: which, again, was a common response when earlier European imperialists were confronted by rebellions in – say – India or Algeria or Kenya. That’s the purpose of his hoped-for mass expulsion of Arabs from northern Gaza – a type of ‘ethnic cleansing’, surely; and the draconian collective punishment he is meting out for those who stay.

Some critics suspect that Netanyahu actually welcomes the present crisis as furnishing him with an excuse for further Israeli expansion, which may be why he didn’t nip the Hamas invasion earlier in the bud. Wearing another of my academic hats, as a ‘secret service’ historian, it seemed odd to me that Israel was taken so much by surprise by the Hamas attack, when Mossad is supposed to be the most effective spy agency in the world. Is there more in this than meets the eye?

None of this, however, should stop us condemning in the strongest possible terms Hamas’s bestial attack on Israeli men, women and children last weekend. Maybe this is not the best time even to try to understand it, if understanding is taken to be letting the real villains off the hook.

But this will nonetheless be required later, if there is to be any peaceful solution to the seemingly intractable problem of Palestine today. Israelis could make a start by facing up to their past crimes: maybe by paying reparations to the dispossessed. Palestinians should accept the situation that those injustices helped create, as a fait accompli, and learn to live with their colonialist neighbours de novo. History can’t be allowed to rule and stifle them: not even, if this were possible, memories of the Nazi holocaust. As well as the past, religion and race should be taken out of the political equation, too.

All this would probably require a ‘two state’ solution; which incidentally many Jews, especially in the diaspora, still favour – if they don’t renounce Zionism entirely, as some do. (And, they claim, on orthodox Jewish grounds.) Maybe that’s out of the question now, as almost everyone is telling us. In which case we may all be – echoing Private Fraser in Dad’s Army – doomed.

But what do I know? I’m no expert. And my history doesn’t really help.

It pains me to say it, but on the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ in Britain Suella Braverman is essentially right. The upper classes never have integrated into the various cultures of the rest of Britain, or even tried to; by contrast with most of the foreign immigrants that Braverman seems to have had on her mind in her recent Washington speech (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrpAMttlIkQ).

Of course there are examples of Moslems, Jews and other cultural, national, religious or ethnic ‘identities’ deliberately keeping themselves apart from their British neighbours for years on end; but most of them have managed to ‘fit in’ quite comfortably in one way or another, with the cultures they brought with them surviving, but modified by their interactions with their hosts, and often – usually, I would say – enriching the latters’ cultures immeasurably. An obvious example is our culinary culture; but there are others too. (It isn’t widely known that fish and chips were introduced to England by a Dutch Jewish refugee.) The reason for this is that ‘national identity’ – Britain’s, at any rate – is not a static thing, set in aspic, essentially unchanging from (say) King Alfred’s time, and merely threatened by others, as Vladimir Putin seems to regard Holy Mother Russia’s; but always varied, disputed, changing: in other words alive, and all the more interesting and – usually – admirable for that. It certainly is to a historian. How dull, not to say inexplicable, would the history of Britain be otherwise? And change, and fertilisation by other cultures, are essential aspects of Britain’s ‘identity’ (or identities), as they are of most other nations’. We should rejoice in them.

The British upper classes, however, are different. If you want to know what an unassimilated minority looks like, they stand out far more obviously than any ‘racial’ group which is currently living in, or desirous of coming to, Britain. With their segregated schools, distinctive accents, snobbishness, peculiar customs, their own versions of history (vide Jacob Rees Mogg’s The Victorians), social exclusivity, class loyalties, arrogant avoidance of many of the laws and decencies that bind the rest of us (Bullingdon? Partygate?); here surely is an alien population living amongst us with no desire at all to integrate. As one popular slogan has put it, ‘It’s not the Estonians you should fear, but the Etonians.’

Of course they too started off as an immigrant wave, coming over the Channel in small (or smallish) boats in 1066. The difference is that these Norman newcomers stayed on only in order to dispossess and dominate the rest of us. None of our current immigrants and refugees is likely to do that. Unless, that is, they manage to assimilate with the settled upper classes – often via Eton and Winchester, or the Conservative Party – thus exchanging one form of ‘alienness’ for another. Braverman is one of those who has done this. I suppose one could consider that as an example of ‘multiculturalism’ that has ‘failed’.

In fact there is no such thing as a settled British (or even English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish) ‘identity’ or ‘culture’. My Britain’s Contested History. Lessons for Patriots (Bloomsbury, 2022) bears on this. Please buy a copy. (No-one else appears to have done.)

Rory Stewart – ex-Conservative MP (one of the decent ones) and also an Old Etonian (ditto) – writes this in his recent memoir, Politics on the Edge.

‘Campaigning back in Cumbria, I began to notice that if a house was filled with books, the occupants would not be voting Conservative.’

Coming from a Tory, I think that’s revealing. Élitist, of course, which is why a Leftist couldn’t write it; but probably true.