Porter’s Pensées

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?

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.)]