Porter’s Pensées

Sorry for the further delay. My medical problem is still holding me up. (No, I’m not going to tell you what it is! Slightly embarrassing.) But I should be able to resume blogging soon.

In the meantime I wonder how the climate-change deniers are reacting to the current terrible global heat-wave. ‘Nothing abnormal.’ ‘It’s happened before.’ ‘Don’t interfere.’ ‘Trust to nature’…?

In fact trusting to nature (or to a benevolent God) could be at the root of many of our problems today. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and pandemics are ‘natural’ too. As are financial crises, trade depressions and the like.

Which is the best argument against the neo-liberal way of looking at political economy. Laissez-faire, or the free market, doesn’t conduce to the good of all. Those who believed it did, from the nineteenth century onwards, were in hock to a notion as foolish as the belief that God (or nature) would take care of everything. In other words, it’s based on a great leap of blind faith, and not on logic. And a very convenient leap, of course, if it means you don’t need to put yourself out, and do anything.

I wonder how many climate-change deniers are neo-liberals too? Ex-Chancellor Nigel Lawson I know is one… Do the two ideologies go together?

And – very incidentally – neither nature nor God is solving my medical condition. For that I’m depending on state intervention – in this case from the excellent Swedish health service.

If he had not been so controversially dismissed on Sunday, Johnny Bairstow might possibly have won the match for England. He would probably have had the necessary 42 runs in him, which the tail-enders didn’t.

But that isn’t the important thing. Quite apart from its effect on the result of the game, the nature of YJB’s dismissal has sullied an Ashes series that was developing – whoever the ultimate victor – into one of the best of modern times. I’m one of those old-fashioned cricket fans who admire the game for its ‘spirit’; against which the Aussies clearly offended by not withdrawing their appeal. For me, the remainder of the series will now be inevitably devalued.

But: am I necessarily a worse human being for being more angered by this incident – albeit hopefully only momentarily – than by Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine?

(American readers may not understand. I’m afraid the US won its independence before cricket was firmly rooted there. I see that the modern US has a national team, but mostly made up of people with south Asian names. – I wonder whether the idea of ‘sportsmanship’ – ‘it’s just not cricket’ – has the same purchase there that it used to have in the UK? Obviously not in the GOP.)

I don’t believe that all those who voted for Brexit were racists; or – to put it differently, because I have no evidence for this – I don’t want to believe that they were racists. There were, and are, better reasons for voting for ‘sov’rinty’ than that. For those who were racist, however, it must be disconcerting to find that the white Europeans who used to work for us have now been replaced by browner Asians and others, who must appear more objectionable than Klaus from Germany or Marie from France, to anyone who measures a person’s worth by the colour of his or her skin.

This is what my recent experience in a British hospital brought home to me. All my (admirable) doctors and nurses were non-European (apart from one – but is Lithuania in the EU?), and – as it happens – women. Mind you, this was in Hull, where I understand the shortage of British-trained medical staff is more acute than anywhere else in the country. Is it the same elsewhere? And did Brexit play a part in this? Was one of its effects to make Britain even more multi-racial than before? That would be ironic if so; and perhaps a reason for true – global –  internationalists to thank Farage.

Back in Sweden it’s all very different, of course. The health system works here as it doesn’t any longer in Britain. I’m getting excellent treatment (for the same condition) from my Swedish doctor and nurses. Not free, admittedly (200 kronor a visit, up to a certain amount each year); but worth it.

But it’s obviously unfair to compare Stockholm with Hull in this regard. One is a national metropolis, with world-leading hospitals; the other a neglected backwater, with not much to recommend it for ambitious medics. And Sweden, of course, is still in the EU.

It was John Stuart Mill who is supposed to have first called the Tories ‘the stupid party’; a reputation they seem to be intent on living up (or down) to today. This is not a partisan point, or intended to be; I’ve never characterised those with political views I don’t share as necessarily ‘stupid’, and indeed regard ‘stupidity’ as pretty evenly distributed among all parties at most times. The present-day British Conservative party, however, is beginning to look as though it is taking on the label as a badge of honour; maybe to distinguish it from the ‘experts’ whom Michael Gove so memorably rubbished around 2020 (when they were predicting that Brexit would make us worse off), and from the over-educated ‘élitists’ who are seen as looking down their noses at ordinary folk.

This is why we of the ‘intelligentsia’ (I suppose I must be one of them) need to be careful before calling out the objective stupidity (surely) of men like Lee Anderson, the new Tory MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, and recently appointed deputy Chair of the Conservative Party; when he recently made the astonishing claim that ‘Britain invented everything that’s good in this world’. That came soon after his other notorious assertion: that there was no need for food banks, because anyone with any nous could prepare a nutritious meal from scratch for 30 pence. Hence his current nickname: ‘30p Lee’.

I can’t say whether these statements are proof of genuine stupidity; or of simple ignorance, which is not necessarily the same thing; or (thirdly) of deliberate falsehood, in order to encourage what Anderson would regard as British ‘patriotism’ in his potential voters. But they certainly fit with the current trend not only in British politics, but also worldwide, of disregarding truth and logic in favour of assertions that might carry warmer feelings in those you want to persuade. It’s all part of the new ‘post-truth’ era, associated nowadays with ex-President Trump, but with much older and deeper roots, and a broader appeal, especially to a certain kind of democrat. ‘I’m a free American, and can believe anything I like’, as I heard a contributor to a phone-in programme declare on US radio a few years ago. (He’d been caught out on an obvious falsity.) Arguments are weapons, nothing more; and don’t need to be true or even credible to be effective.

I’d like to think that the recent fashion for ‘postmodern’ relativism – the bane of my scholarly life – is partly responsible for this; but I doubt whether 30p Lee has read any Foucault or Derrida. The solution must lie in education; and education in rational thinking – logic – above all. And perhaps we ‘élitists’ should be less nervous of calling out stupidity, when it’s obvious.

No-one comes out of this incident well. The Iraqi immigrant who burned the book outside a Stockholm mosque most obviously – the burning of books has a poor historical reputation in Europe. But also the crowds of Muslims who demonstrated violently against the event in other countries, and have given the Turkish president another excuse to block Sweden’s joining of NATO; what on earth has a perceived insult to a religion to do with national defence? And of course it’s ridiculous that destroying a single copy of a ‘sacred’ text should give such offence to anyone, let alone a whole religion; which must itself damage the reputation of that religion – or of any organised religion – among rational people.

Thirdly, however: the Swedish authorities should have realised the harm the burning might cause, which would have been a practical if not a very principled excuse for disallowing it; which the police did initially, until overruled by the courts. Sweden is strong on ‘free speech’; but it also has laws against ‘incitement’, which I imagine were behind the police’s initial ban. We live in irrational times, which require us to appease even religious bigotry occasionally. If Sweden is to be condemned, it’s for its innocence; which is at least to be preferred to the bigotry of Salwan Momika (the arsonist) and the Moslem fanatics who are demonstrating against him.

Whatever you may think of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin – and if you’re reading this blog I guess it isn’t very much – you must be struck by the way the personalities of all three of them seem to reflect the present-day characteristics, or widely perceived characteristics, of their respective countries. Trump is a crooked capitalist who headed a crooked capitalist USA; Johnson a representative of the faux-aristocratic public school-educated class that the Brits (or at least the English) are supposed to have subjected themselves to for decades; and Putin, with his KGB background, could be said to personify the cruel autocracy that has been a feature of Russian life from Tsarist right through to Soviet times. Who could be more quintessentially American, or British, or Russian than these three?

Of course two of them are gone now, for the time being at least; and the third is possibly on his way out, thanks to Ukraine and Wagner – although I wouldn’t bet on it. Whether their successors will be quite so starkly representative of their nations remains to be seen. Rishi Sunak – public school, ex-empire, and a wealthy financier – reflects a slightly different, but still characteristic, side of modern Britain. In all these cases, our leaders mirror our dominant (but not necessarily typical) national characteristics in a quite remarkable way; far more than Wilson, say, or Thatcher, or Major ever did; or Khrushchev and the Bushes, for that matter.

*

Grateful thanks to those who sent me good wishes during my spell in hospital. I’m out now, and back in Sweden; to whose health service I’m about to entrust my elderly body tomorrow. (I’m afraid – and I’m reluctant to write this, in view of my principled and I think patriotic support for our NHS – that my English hospital made a bit of a mess of me.)

Sorry for the long silence. I was unexpectedly whisked into (UK) hospital a month ago. Nothing serious, as it turns out, but some pretty unpleasant procedures before that was established; and I came out feeling worse than when I went in. With loving help from Kajsa and my children I’ve just managed the hairy journey back to Sweden, where I’m currently resting up, with tubes coming out of me, and about 24 tablets to swallow a day. Of course I’ve been following the crazy news from Britain, and hope to be well enough to comment on it in a few days’ time.

If nations can be said to have ‘identities’, most of them have multiple ones. Usually these are based on ‘history’, or on what has been cherry-picked out of their histories by people wanting to make patriotic or counter-patriotic points. Often they change fundamentally over time. The dominant British image of the Germans in the mid-19^th century, for example, was of a dreamy and impractical people; the contrast with today could hardly be greater. National self ‘identities’ – even at the same time – can vary according to a number of factors: race, class, gender, ideological preferences, and what you were taught at school. I’ll bet, for example, that the histories of Britain that Boris, Rees-Mogg and Sunak were taught at their Public schools differed from mine, a grammar school boy’s. (I once wrote to Eton College to enquire about its history syllabus, and received no reply, so I can’t be sure; but Rees Mogg’s dreadful The Victorians – ‘a clichéd, lazy history’ that ‘often reads like it was written by a baboon’: that’s the Daily Telegraph, no less – may give some idea. Or was Jacob not listening properly?) In their cases it seems to have given them a glorified view of Britain’s past, which they believe can be extended into the present now that she has broken free from the shackles of Brussels. It also, of course, lies behind their present ‘culture wars’ onslaught on the ‘woke’ history that they believe is designed to undermine Britons’ pride in their past, and hence their patriotism.

My recent Britain’s Contested History: Lessons for Patriots (Bloomsbury, 2022) is intended to put them right about all this; not by denigrating Britain’s past, in order to make it something to be ashamed of – slavery, imperialism, and all the rest – which tends to be the approach of the counter-patriots; but by showing how complex that past was – the causes, motives and situations behind events – and so how superficial and misleading judgements about it, either way, can be.

British imperialism – one of my historical specialities – is a key example; and my research into which was probably the main reason why my view of Britain’s entire history has been – as you might call it – ambivalent. But the ambivalence went back further than this. I don’t remember much of my school history, in the 1950s, except that it omitted wars, the Empire and ‘kings and queens’ entirely; as did the undergraduate courses I took at university. That’s not at all to say that all these courses were devoid of at least an implied ‘patriotism’; but it was a very different kind of patriotism from the one that our Old Etonian (and perhaps Wykhamist) rulers seem to have imbibed from their educations two or three decades later. In my school I remember learning about the growth of political freedom in Britain; of various forms of emancipation – Jews, nonconformists, Catholics, the working classes, women (finally), homosexuals, slaves, and then the colonies; of the extension of ‘liberalism’ (understood as it was then, not so much today); of heroic movements of protest; and of the gradual amelioration of life for everyone – called ‘social reform’ – culminating in the welfare state. Resistance to Fascism was another of the themes we were made aware of, and which provided the main context for our study of World War II.

These were the cherries we picked; movements and events that ran through the ‘narrative’ of Britain’s modern history as we were taught it, and hence our ‘national identity’ there and then. It was also the narrative I broadly kept to when I started teaching modern British history in my first university job; not without acknowledging the counter-narratives of wars, oppression, upper-class domination, racism, atrocity and all the other evils that today’s anti-patriots emphasize – indeed, I dwelled on them; but preferring to believe that the ‘progressive’ features of our history had as much claim to define our ‘national identity’ as any others. That obviously tied in with the climate of ‘hope’, which, as I suggested in my last post, was a characteristic of the 1950s; and is no longer.

Today it is presented as irretrievably ‘woke’ on the political Right, including by the new ‘National Conservatives’, who have suddenly intruded upon our national scene (inspired, as I understand it, by the American Right). The ‘NatCons’ clearly have a very different notion of British ‘national identity’ from the one I was taught – and then taught myself – all those years ago. My sort, according to one of them – the awful ‘30p Lee’ Anderson – should ‘emigrate’ if we don’t like their version of ‘patriotism’. – Is it too far-fetched to be a little worried by the prefixing of the term ‘Conservative’ by ‘National’, in this context? Much as was done with ‘Socialist’, in pre-war Germany?

Who now remembers the 1950s? I do. I grew up then, from 9 to 19 years. To later generations the fifties have been presented as rather boring and repressive, especially when looked back on through the glass of the ‘swinging sixties’, when everything supposedly sprang into life again.

At the time, however, the era didn’t appear like that to me. This was partly because I didn’t yet have the advantage of that golden next decade to view it through; and partly because – as I wrote in a review article about the fifties I published a few years ago (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/swinging-fifties/), unless you were a woman, a homosexual or a criminal awaiting execution, the 1950s weren’t all that bad. That’s why I still harbour a degree of nostalgia for them. (And it’s not just because it was then that the adolescent me discovered ‘girls’. I was hardly allowed near them in any case: single-sex school, strict ‘moral’ upbringing, ignorance, and the like.)

I can acknowledge, and indeed recognise, the downsides of that era, even for a middle-class, male, heterosexual and law-abiding boy like me. I was fortunate in all those regards. But even for us relatively privileged people the food was still atrocious; TV black-and-white and blurry; people’s dress similarly monochrome; our rulers and radio presenters toffee-nosed (and nearly all male); our Empire  collapsing; the popular music infantile (quite literally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=safoNysTrbE); you couldn’t shop on Sundays; women were excluded from the best jobs; unmarried mothers were shamed and persecuted; and we boys could get caned for minor breaches of school rules. In addition, we all lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. Soviet spies were everywhere – especially in my old university, and (allegedly) at No. 10. Materially and socially, there can be little doubt that most things were a whole lot worse in the fifties than they are now. And yet…

The fifties did have some admirable aspects, even by today’s materialistic standards. We were still recovering from the economic effects of the recent war, which had explained most of our earlier privations; and pretty well in the main. We could all – we males – get jobs, and one man’s salary could support a whole family. We had thriving industries again, especially making cars, ships and world-beating aircraft – i.e. big stuff; but now supplemented by a welfare state that protected what could be seen as the era’s victims, including a well-functioning National Health Service – our country’s pride and joy. Even the Conservatives accepted that. University education was free, with even our living subsidised. Foreign delights were beginning to assail us: cheap trips abroad, exotic dishes from the Empire, American music (jazz) and movies. All these were gradually adding lustre to our lives.

To compensate for the downsides of our national existence there were also burgeoning protest movements: against imperialism, South African apartheid, and – most prominently – ‘the Bomb’. On another level, we had Private Eye and the Goons to chip away at our betters’ toffee-nosed pretensions. Even imperial decline could be regarded positively, especially in the guise in which it was popularly presented: as less of a decline than a metamorphosis, from an ‘empire’ imposed from above to a free, equal, multiracial and self-governing ‘Commonwealth’. (What socialist could object to that term?) All these seemed – except to the most blimpish of Tories – to be signs of progress; and of an enduring progress: which is what gave the progressive people of that time – including me – a reason for hope. That was the conclusion of my TLS article, and is the main reason for my present 1950s nostalgia. Then was a time of hope. For most of us, today emphatically isn’t.

So, how did we get from there to here? The great turn took place, I think, in the later 1970s. It was then that we got Thatcher, Murdoch, foolish and short-sighted (or, if you like, over-powerful) trade unions, and – underlying everything – the inexorable progress and expansion into almost every corner of our lives of late-stage capitalism.

But that’s probably too simple. I may elaborate on it in a new edition of my old (and rather underrated, I think) Britannia’s Burden. The Political Evolution of Modern Britain, which stopped in 1990. That is, if I can sustain my enthusiasm and restore my fast-fading energy for the task; and then find a publisher to take it on. (No luck yet with that.)

You’ll have seen the news from Britain, that a number of ‘Republicans’ intending to peacefully demonstrate at King Charles’s coronation procession were arrested by the police before even getting their placards up, on the grounds that they ‘might’ cause trouble; and this after the leaders’ having squared their intended actions with the police weeks before the day. Rishi Sunak thinks this was OK. Coronations – and monarchy itself – are of course very British. (If you don’t like them, said the vice-chair of the Conservative Party a few days ago, then you should ‘emigrate’.) It follows that trying to protest or disrupt them in any way is ‘unpatriotic’.

Now: I don’t know what parts of Britain’s history our self-styled ‘patriots’ are particularly proud of; but if it doesn’t include popular protest then their list is seriously deficient. Of course our tradition of protesting is not nearly as impressive as France’s – a fact which was a cause of xenophobic pride in the 19th century (it showed how giddy the French were) – but there has certainly been a great deal of it over the years, on behalf of a number of causes, not all of them what we might regard as ‘progressive’, and most of them failing to achieve anything much; but many of them helping to speed things up in a way that leaving these issues to Parliament probably wouldn’t have done. Votes for men and for women are the obvious examples. Decolonisation may be another. Not that I want to claim that popular opposition to colonial misdeeds was the – or even ‘a’ – major factor behind the fall of the British Empire in the middle of the last century; but it was there, albeit unnoticed by many left-wingers today. As well as an ‘imperial’ Britain there was always an anti-imperial – or at least a deeply critical – one, which certainly contributed to her retreat from her colonies from the 1940s – or even earlier – on.

Anti-imperialism was of course the subject of my first book, Critics of Empire, published in 1968; and in subsequent books I’ve argued that indeed anti-imperialism, as a general philosophy, was invented in Britain, in a way that imperialism itself certainly wasn’t. (See British Imperial. What the Empire Wasn’t, 2016; and Britain’s Contested History. Lessons for Patriots, 2022). If we’re into ‘national pride’, and all the other ‘patriotic’ stuff, isn’t that something we Brits could be ‘proud’ of’? Even Charlie boy, in his purple robes and golden carriage; if he thought about it a bit. (He seems a thoughtful fellow.) In this sense, arresting republicans in the Mall for just being republicans, is almost the most unpatriotic thing one could imagine. We Brits are surely better than that; at least in patches.