Porter’s Pensées

At the age of 81 (82 if you count it from conception) I realise that I have very little time left to me for writing. Which may be just as well, in view of the abject failure of my latest book, Britain’s Contested History, to be even noticed by reviewers; partly because its argument has been superseded by events, but also – no doubt – because it isn’t very good. My powers are failing, together with my memory and my arthritic joints. So I shall have to rely on my past efforts to sustain any academic reputation I may carry with me from the grave. How do those efforts measure up? (I’m thinking here only in terms of my publications; I’m not well placed to assess my record as a teacher, father and all the rest, and far too nervous to attempt it.)

My major textbook, The Lion’s Share, the first objective and balanced history, I think, of British imperialism, is still doing extraordinarily well, going through six editions from 1975 to 2021. Better still, I was told it was banned by one American State school system for appearing to suggest that Christianity was a ‘superstition’. I regard that as an accolade. But a number of my subsequent books have failed just as abjectly as Contested History. The two major flops were Britain, Europe and the World: Delusions of Grandeur (1983), and Britannia’s Burden (1994), both ‘general’ interpretive histories. I still think they were good – I don’t write rubbish deliberately – but they obviously didn’t suit the market, which is overstocked in this area anyway. My books about nineteenth-century refugees and secret political policing fulfilled their purpose as scholarly works, adding to our knowledge. My little diversion into Victorian architecture, The Battle of the Styles (2011), was pretty well ignored, except by an architectural historian who objected to the fact that I didn’t keep to the accepted architectural history conventions, but instead sought to set the subject in a broader historical context; which was in fact the whole purpose of the book, and the way I think most art history ought to be written. My more recent works on the British empire – one of them, Empire and Superempire (2006), comparing it to the American – seem to have been pretty well noticed over there. I’ve no idea how well my recent collections of essays – mainly reprinted from the London Review of Books, which has now given up on me – have done. Or my more occasional pieces on Europhobia, national identity, Norway and Sweden, Elgar, and Brexit.

Clearly I’ve published too much. But what impact has it all had on readers’ thinking about – in particular – the British Empire? One of The Lion’s Share’s overarching themes was that the Empire was not the great powerful entity it was supposed to be at the time, and indeed could be seen as a product of national weakness in a number of ways, rather than of strength. I’m not sure that this has significantly infiltrated into present-day popular ideas about the old Empire, either on the neo-imperial Right, which wants something to celebrate, or among the anti-imperialist Left, which needs a powerful bogey to combat; but there it is. My two most obviously influential works were Critics of Empire (1968, new edition 2011), establishing that anti-imperialism was as important a tradition in British national life as were any of the pro-imperial ideologies that were around in the high imperial age; and indeed that anti-imperialism could be said to have been invented in Britain, which imperialism of course was not; and secondly The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004), using new methodology to undermine – as I reckoned – the idea that the Empire and imperialism dominated British culture and society to the extent claimed by one influential school of history, and assumed by many others. That latter theme is still hotly debated today, which would indicate that the book had some impact.

It’s not however the impact I would have ideally liked; and I hope it’s not the only one. Throughout my writing career I’ve wanted to convey the complexity of history, and in particular of historical causation; with – in effect  – motives, and therefore individual people, not necessarily playing as large a part in the way things worked out as did ‘broad impersonal currents’, and a myriad of other factors, including even ‘accident’. With regard to ‘imperialism’ this is particularly important, with the word itself covering and muddling very different phenomena, which if they are not disaggregated can confuse and distort the picture. The old adage – define your terms – is an essential part of this.

I once suggested at a conference that we imperial historians place a moratorium on the very use of the ‘I’-word for – say – five years, in order to force us to find other terms to describe the particular phenomena we were alluding to; in the interests of clarity, and even – if this is ever a realisable objective – of truth. No-one seems to have taken me up on it. ‘Imperialism’ is still bandied about indiscriminately. So that lesson hasn’t struck home. And at 81 (or 82) it’s too late now for me to do anything about it.

Back now in sensible Sweden; whose newspapers report British politics pretty accurately – Dagens Nyheter’s UK correspondent lives in London and is married to, or partnered by, an Engelsman – but hardly flatteringly. From over here the goings-on in my country of birth appear almost unbelievable, and inconceivable to the ever-rational Swedes; although with politics pretty fluid here currently, and crazy Trumpian opinions just beginning to emerge, that may not last.

Of course the Swedes are right as regards Britain: ‘O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us!’ (Burns, of course. Trust the Scots.) British government is indeed descending into what seems to be very much like farce just now; not merely error and stupidity (Brexit), but something far crazier. Boris started it, and was admired by those who appreciated the fun he injected into politics. Then we had, briefly, the inordinately stupid Liz Truss, who in just a few weeks brought the British economy to its knees. Now we’ve got the already disgraced Matt Hancock MP, putting the ‘fun’ before everything, including proper politics and his own constituents, by appearing in a popular TV ‘reality’ programme, I’m a Celebrity: Get me out of here; where he has to sleep rough in an Australian jungle and endure crawling among rats and poisonous spiders in the dark, and with shit poured on him, before eating ostrich anuses (ani?) and raw kangaroo penises (penes?), in full camera view. (That’s as reported. I’ve not watched it myself.) Hancock claims he’s doing this in order to bring politics to the people; but it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that his £400,000 fee didn’t have something to do with it. And then there’s Gavin Williamson (with his bullying and his pet tarantula), Nadine Dorries (another anus-eating I’m a Celebrity contestant); and always, of course, those two pre-eminent clowns Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg, to keep the farcical side of this whole theatrical event, a.k.a. a ‘Tory Government’, in full public view. Would Sweden, or any other country on earth, tolerate this kind of thing? Although they might recognise it in Britain’s case from Monty Python – ever popular in Sweden – and, if they go back that far, the Goon Show. But those weren’t meant to be real. They are now.

Programmes like this however may have been partly responsible for diluting the seriousness of British politics. That’s what many of the political clowns I’ve just referenced seem to lack any appreciation of. Many people – Tories especially – seem to go into politics not in order to further great causes (or even minor ones), but simply as a career opportunity, and as a kind of game, there for the ‘winning’, by fair means or foul. Other TV programmes, not intended to be comedic, contribute to this. House of Cards, West Wing, The Thick of It, and even the excellent Danish Borgen, concentrated almost exclusively on individual character, machinations, plots and personalities, to the detriment of what Tony Benn used to call ‘the ishoos’; as they are probably bound to, as dramas involving actors, and so requiring their audiences to empathise – or otherwise – with them as people. This of course goes back a long way. Shakespeare’s political plays – Julius Caesar, King Lear, the English ‘Histories’, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra – oh, most of them – are exactly the same. That’s how (educated) Britons learn their politics. (And it’s probably how Boris Johnson will frame his study of Shakespeare – if he ever gets back to writing it, in between his luxurious holidays in Mustique.) Most people only appreciate politics as personal drama. Look at all the coverage of it in the tabloid press today.

Has it ever been better? I remember its being at least a little less trivial from the 1950s through to the 1970s – maybe a little longer – before the popular press became quite as ‘down’ on politics and politicians as it is today. But the press is just another branch of ‘entertainment’, after all. And for many of its readers farce is the most appealing genre of entertainment; including the Whitehall sort.

I’m so depressed these days that I find it hard to understand how everybody else in Britain isn’t depressed too. Apart of course for those who are selfishly profiting from the present situation; and I should have thought that even some of them might feel a few shivers of apprehension about whither this may be leading us all.

Personally, I have no substantial reason to be depressed, apart from the usual old-age infirmities, and the fact that my latest book seems to have been superseded by events and sunk like a lead balloon. (I pleaded with the publishers to bring it out earlier, but publishing has a dynamic of its own.) Both of those setbacks I’m pretty well reconciled to. I’m not yet seriously affected by rising prices or the demolition of the welfare state, apart from not being able to see a doctor any more (vide supra). I long ago lost my libido, which was a tremendous relief. (No more lusting after women. I could appreciate them for who they were.) I have the love of a good woman, of a dog (it loves everyone), and of my children (I like to think). I have a bolt-hole to escape to, in the much more politically congenial environment of Sweden, although from what Kajsa tells me that congeniality may be under threat from the Swedish Right soon. (They’re aping Priti and Suella over the immigration of refugees, of which I consider myself to be one – a refugee from Brexit. If I hadn’t got my Swedish citizenship three years ago, I might not be granted it now.) I can always move there for good, and leave the toxic UK behind. So, there’s very little to depress me in my personal life. I’m one of a uniquely fortunate generation, country and class, with just enough money to get by on, and no wars that I’ve needed to get involved in: except to protest against. That’s half the trouble: I feel guilty for feeling like this when I have nothing to feel like this about. And that makes me even more depressed.

Concerned friends ply me with cures for my depression: medicines (currently I’m on Fluoxetine – it doesn’t seem to be helping), or healthier food, or more exercise, and in one case ‘magic mushrooms’. (I gave that a miss.) I’ve even tried psycho-analysis – for about a week. No relief.

But I’m beginning to feel anyway that this is entirely the wrong approach. It’s predicated on the assumption that depression is an illness, a malfunction, something that has gone wrong in my body or my psyche; whereas I think it may be normal. It’s the happy and untroubled people who are ill. I get irritated by pictures of people looking cheerful, and by anyone joking merrily on TV. The fools! Don’t they know?

We currently have a crazy, malevolent and incompetent government. The popular Press are lying to us. The Russians are coming. Capitalism is about to implode. Britain is in danger of going full-on Fascist, before the earth roasts to a frazzle, and (eventually) plunges into the sun. The Left is powerless, in the face of vested interests, rich capitalist propagandists, and public ignorance. And all folk can do is obsess about royalty (who don’t really matter), football, soap opera stars, and ‘reality’ TV. Or about gender, racism and ‘wokeness’ generally, for the rather more serious.  – But just look around you. We’re doomed!!  Isn’t that enough to make depression the normal and only rational way of reacting to our situation? From which it follows that cheerfulness and apathy are the real ‘illnesses’ of society.

Or is this just for now, when the American mid-terms look ominous, Cop-27 seems bound to fail, the British government is packed with proto-fascists, even Sweden is sliding into reaction, the weather (in Hull) is cold and damp; and I’ve simply got out of bed the wrong side?

As an oldie, I look back fondly nowadays to the 1950s and ’60s, when – whatever our privations, and the threat of ‘The Bomb’ – we at least had hope. (I wrote a piece on this for the Times Literary Supplement, 23 December 2016; republished in my Britain Before Brexit, 2021, chapter 11.) That was under the Labour governments of Attlee and Wilson, and the only slightly less progressive Tory government of Macmillan. Capitalism was tamed. Colonies were winning their freedom. We were about to enter a partnership with our new European friends. Gays were about to be liberated. Things were getting better, for everyone: even workers and women. A sunny future for all beckoned, under social democracy.

It’s this – the loss of hope – that I think is getting me down these days. There seems to be no cure for that. Hence the Black Dog. I hope this post doesn’t spread it to others. That would make me even more depressed.

So, the old idea that women becoming leaders would make politics kinder and more charitable has turned out to be as mistaken – and basically as sexist – as the notion that they couldn’t play rugby (because of their softer upper chests), or fly passenger aircraft safely (what if a menopause suddenly came on?). Of course, with regard to politics you might argue that women could only succeed insofar as they emulated the worst aspects of masculinity – Thatcher, Patel, Braverman – and had the patriarchy behind them. But it knocks on the head the simplistic notion that men are at the root of all our ills, and only need to be replaced by the ‘gentler’ sex for peace and happiness to prevail.

In a similar way we’ve recently been disabused of the idea (in Britain) that a cabinet of second-generation immigrants would be more charitably disposed towards present-day asylum-seekers. In Patel’s and Braverman’s cases the opposite seems to be true. Which reminds me, historically, of those 19th-century British Jews who vociferously opposed new Jewish immigration around 1900 on the grounds that it would provoke nativist anti-semitism, which would then rebound against them. It’s called ‘pulling the ladder up behind you’.

So we can’t depend on gender or ethnicity to modify attitudes which generally speaking are formed by other factors, arising from the communities in which one is living presently, affecting both genders and all ethnicities; and in which locality, class, schooling, levels of income, the propaganda you are subjected to, and maybe your personal psychology, will be paramount. Our new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s political attitudes are far more likely to be affected by his (and his wife’s) fabulous personal riches, and his education at the most venerable ‘Public’ school in England (to which he has just gifted more than £100,000, as if Winchester needed it), than by his much lauded ‘British-Asian’ heritage. (The same applied to his distinguished ‘British-Jewish’ predecessor, Benjamin Disraeli.) Don’t be too influenced by the fact that all these influential politicians are either non-white, or women, or both. The Tory party, despite its misogynist and racist reputation, never has been. Class and ideology trump ‘race’ and gender every time.

I see I’ve been silent, blog-wise, for three weeks now. That’s easily explained. Covid-19 eventually caught up with me, followed by ‘long Covid’ – worse if anything, although not so chesty – and a week struggling to write a review of a huge book – over 800 closely-printed pages – which I’m not sure I did justice to in the circumstances. Then just exhaustion, and the old familiar ‘black dog’. About which I may blog later on; depression in general, that is, not just mine. Taster: I think depressed is the only healthy way to be, these days.

Off back to Sweden on Friday. Where I shall be able to see a doctor, at long last.

I never wanted this blog to be a personal diary, and don’t want it to become one now. My experiences are unimportant. After all, I’m not the first person to catch Covid 19, or even the billionth. Nor am I alone in Britain in being unable to consult a doctor about my illness, in any form: in person, or via Zoom or the phone. I used to think that my problems in this regard – retailed here: https://bernardjporter.com/2022/10/07/come-back-nanny/ – might be peculiar to the grossly underprivileged part of England I live in; but today’s news reveals that it’s a far more general problem, and consequently worth mentioning in a political blog: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/oct/20/ministers-accused-of-ignoringscale-of-problems-facing-gps-in-england. There today’s depersonalisation of GP provision is called ‘überisation’, which sounds about right. Überising – on top of privatisation – represents another stab in the heart of the old NHS we used to know and love. Which is why I’m looking forward to returning to my personal doctor in Sweden, who knows my history (and is very good). That’s after I’ve recovered enough from my current bout of untreated Covid to travel.

Here’s a little video of my doctor’s surgery in Stockholm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F47RujibBzE. – OK, maybe they shouldn’t be fooling around like this; but it’s good to know that they have the time to. They wouldn’t in Hull.

British politics has been moving further and further to the Right over the past ten years or so – forty years, if we date it from the advent of Thatcher – and at a crazily accelerating speed over the last few months. Brexit was a part of that. Now with the Truss-Kwarteng project (‘growth, growth, growth’, reward the rich, low taxes, ‘trickle-down’…..) we might have reached the final stage in that process, the free marketeers’ goal all along: if the train had not suddenly smashed into the buffers last week.

This was obviously a bit of a shock for the most dogmatic neoliberals themselves, who must have assumed that the ‘markets’ were on their side – which was why they didn’t bother to consult the OBR – and who may have shared that old capitalist idea, going back to Adam Smith, and even embraced by Marx, that the ‘free market’ was a force of nature, no less, like all those other forces of nature that were being discovered by scientists at the time, and so not to be denied. The idea of capitalism as ‘natural’ has been a compelling and comforting argument for neo-liberals for two centuries now, on a number of levels, both intellectually, and on the level of simple slogans: ‘people are naturally selfish’, ‘you can’t go against human nature’, ‘there is no alternative’, and so on. Unfortunately for them, another ‘natural’ feature of just about anything from plants and animals to the planet itself, is the phenomenon of decline. Nothing ever ‘grows’ for ever. Most things contain within them the seeds of their own destruction. Marx saw that.

Are the extraordinary events of the last few days (in Britain) a sign of this natural process of final decline (and fall)? For the moment (Sunday evening), the train crash seems to have been averted temporarily. The ‘market’, plus Truss’s stupidity and Kwarteng’s arrogance, saw to that. Maybe a more grown-up government – Jeremy Hunt, or Labour – can still save the day, for now. For there are ways of taming the beast: Keynesianism, welfareism, more traditional Conservatism, social democracy – call it what you will. Otherwise, Collapse, or Revolution, here we come. In the meantime, I’m quite enjoying the ride.

When she beatles her brow like this …

… doesn’t she remind you of …

…. ‘Chucky’ (from the horror films)?

I’ll have more to say about the current ludicrous state of politics in Britain when – if – I recover from the Covid which has just caught up with me here. I knew I shouldn’t have left our safe Swedish island.

Returning to the UK from my period of quarantine in Sweden a few months ago, I suddenly learned that I didn’t have a doctor there any more. I’d been deleted from my surgery’s list without notice or permission, by a shadowy organisation called ‘Modality’ which had apparently taken over the practice, of which I had been a patient (or perhaps it’s now a ‘customer’) for fifty years. Eventually, and after a long tussle with the telephone robots that now rule much of our lives – ‘if you’re wanting to speak to another robot, please press 1’ – I got reinstated.

But that didn’t improve things at all. I still couldn’t get through to a proper doctor, and learned in fact that I didn’t have one: a personal one, that is, who knew me and my medical history; only a general and impersonal relationship with the practice, and an appointment with whichever doctor happened to be free, if I was very lucky, to see me (or talk over the phone) in two or three weeks’ time. Even then consultations were not expected to last more than ten minutes. That wouldn’t cover a tenth of my hypochondriacal complaints.

This is not what I had been used to. Born just a few years before the NHS came into existence, I’ve had wonderful care from a succession of GPs since then, and from NHS hospitals. (One Hull GP even insisted on driving 10 miles out to the maternity hospital to deliver our baby son personally.) I’m not sure whom or what to blame for the decline in the service recently: funding shortages obviously; Brexit possibly (depriving us of foreign doctors and nurses; and by the way, what happened to those millions that Brexit was meant to free up for the NHS?); and in Hull’s case a regional shortage of trained medical staff. The fact that we’ve all been recently deluged by advertising for private health insurance – in Hull it’s mostly from a group of hospitals called ‘Spire’, specifically promising quicker appointments with doctors – must sow the suspicion that it’s deliberate, on the part of a government that never, from its beginnings, liked the very idea of a health service that capitalists couldn’t make ‘loadsamoney’ from. (Which is why we still have some private doctors, and places like Spire.)

It also shocked me coming from Sweden: where medical care is still relatively cheap, hospitals well staffed and maintained, doctors see you quickly and for at least 20 minutes at a time, and who – most importantly – can get to know you personally, and your medical (or hypochondriacal) history. So, having failed to get an appointment in Hull, I’m now planning to return to Stockholm sooner than I intended, in order to be examined by Sarah; who as well as being an excellent doctor reminds me of how the good old NHS used to be in the olden days.

I really do miss the ‘nanny state’. Losing the NHS will be like losing the family that had always taken care of these physical things for you, so liberating you to fulfil your true potential. Ask that notorious nanny’s boy, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Sorry for the personal. But it’s also political. And I don’t suppose my situation is unique.

(PS. I forgot to mention that my Surgery had a flood half-way through this whole process, which it’s still in the process of repairing; and which will excuse some of its failings, but not all.)

I watched the party Leader’s speech to the Tory Party Conference this morning. The protest was fun – Greenpeace interlopers unfurling a large yellow banner that read ‘Who voted for this?’ – which was greatly to the point; although it wasn’t a point that was picked up by the BBC commentators immediately afterwards. That point being, of course, that Truss was voted into Number 10 by only a very small minority of Tory party members, not even MPs, who didn’t represent anybody but their own reactionary and Right-wing kind. It would require another General election to legitimise her democratically; and especially when she’s abandoning many of the promises on which her party was elected (under Johnson) in 2019. She may find this is a weakness in the months to come. Looking at their faces in the hall, I’m not sure that most Tories like her much.

The speech had one basic theme, and one only: ‘Growth’ – the word repeated, I guess, about fifty times. That of course is a fundamental late-capitalist slogan, the thing that is supposed to justify the system, and may well do that to a great extent. What Truss added to it was the old idea that growth could only be achieved by unleashing individual enterprise, specifically by lowering taxes on individuals and companies – and very little more. (‘Low taxation’ was another of her repeated mantras.) That’s the theory, a simple and easily grasped one, and one that obviously appeals to anyone – like most Conservative party delegates – who have pots of money that they would like to keep. For those few among them who do care about the poor in their society, there’s always ‘trickle-down’ to ease their consciences.

But there’s little practical evidence for the ‘low tax’ theory. I presently live half my time in a country that is notorious for its high level of taxation, and therefore of social welfare expenditure, but still out-performs low-tax Britain in industrial production, inventiveness and material prosperity. (It produced a Nobel prize-winner only a couple of days ago.) Growth and high taxation are not mutually incompatible, but often the reverse. But of course only low taxes will enable the already wealthy to become obscenely rich.

Truss kept talking about an ‘Anti- Growth Coalition’ as the main obstacle to her entrepreneurial plans. That puzzled me. What is this ‘Coalition’? I’ve never heard of it before. How can I join?