Porter’s Pensées

I don’t understand. I’ve had it explained to me two or three times, and I still don’t get it. Moreover, I rather suspect that those who have explained it to me don’t really get it either. Or is it just my deteriorating brain, in my old age?

The problem is this. Sweden is self-sufficient in energy, nearly all of it coming from renewable sources, situated in the country itself: wind, water, biofuels (those bumps on the tops of our buses), solar, plus some nuclear (not much). Sweden for long has been a world leader when it comes to ecologically-friendly sources of power. We don’t rely on Russian or any foreign sources at all. So we should be able to control our energy costs, surely, in a way that our neighbours apparently can’t. Yet our electricity bills are about to go soaring, too, albeit hopefully not quite as high as elsewhere. Why?

The answers I’ve had given to me include nuclear decommissioning (for environmental reasons), less wind blowing (!), profiteering, and a number of others; but mainly the fact that we are exporters of energy to countries like Germany and Poland, and so have to be bound by their pricing systems. That’s what I don’t understand. Why should we need to pay what they have to pay, when they have supply problems which we don’t?

The Vänster (Left) party is I think the only one in the forthcoming General Election (11 September) which has latched on to this, and is advocating pricing Sweden’s energy with reference to the Swedish supply-and-demand situation alone. That is being painted as over-nationalistic and uncommunitarian. Is this fair? Or have I misunderstood the whole thing? (Which is likely, I have to say.)

Lastly: isn’t the same true, although to a lesser extent, of the UK? How much gas does Britain get from Russia? Or electricity from France?

Incidentally, I’m following the election here – it will be the first one I can vote in as a citizen – and am impressed by how polite and civilised – boring, if you prefer – the debate is, compared with the British; and also by how competent and reasonable most of the candidates seem to be, again by comparison. (Kajsa thinks I’m flattering them; but then she hasn’t been enmired in British politics these past few years.) The main exception seems to be the Sverigedemokraterna  (SD: very right-wing: think UKIP on akvavit), which has as nasty a line in political invective and lies on social media – not on national telly – as Britain’s wannabe fascists. They’re on 21% just now; Vänsterpartiet (V) is at about 8%; and the Social Democrats (S: equivalent to Labour) on 30%. I’ll be voting V, but hoping that S wins, and takes the Vs into coalition.

I thought that on £26,000 a year – it would be £10,000 more but my ex-wife takes half my occupational pension – I was not badly off.  I can’t afford to run a car, but am not allowed to in any case with my poor eyesight; and have virtually no savings. (A new roof saw to that.) I also pay my way here in Sweden, and have to travel back and forth, which costs a bit. So I’m not a rich man. But I have no mortgage, no obligations to children, who all seem nicely set up; and no other debts – financial ones, at least. And I’ve been getting by for years now in reasonable comfort; which in my eyes makes me richer than most: including the class of filthy rich who always seem to want more.

Then yesterday I read that some government minister or other has warned that even those who earn £45,000 a year are now included in the ‘relatively poor’ category of people who will be hard hit by the current and prospective rise in energy prices; which of course will include me. I had no idea that I was so close to – even under – the poverty line. I imagine that to a Conservative minister, with his ministerial salary, expenses, perks and shares, £45,000 must seem like peanuts. But even allowing for that, it’s clear that ‘comfortable’ people like me are going to find the going hard.

Which won’t affect my own political proclivities. But it hopefully might alert other ‘middling’ people to the gross and criminal deficiencies of this Conservative government, whose lying, incompetence, illegalities, corruption, proto-fascist tendencies, and – yes – partying, have all failed to provoke much of a backlash. For the middle classes, protest generally starts in the pocket.

Hopefully those £45,000 people might also think back further than this present Conservative government, to the days of Thatcher, whose neo-liberal revolution started all this mess off. Which doesn’t look good for Liz Truss, who in the current Tory leadership contest is explicitly positioning herself as the neo-Thatcherite anti-tax and anti-state ‘handout’ candidate. Even ‘middling’ Tories might resile against that, when their energy bills (like mine) start coming in.

For a party and a tendency in British politics that rates ‘leadership’ so highly – Rees-Mogg’s awful book The Victorians is full of it: leaders are his ‘Titans’, who made Britain ‘great’ – isn’t it remarkable that the Tories are so inept at choosing leaders of their own?

In the 20th and 21^st centuries, that is. Before then they didn’t do so badly, with Peel, Disraeli and the Marquis of Salisbury (the 3rd of that title) probably the best of them. But then came Arthur Balfour, Bonar Law, Austen Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, Ian Duncan-Smith, Alec Douglas-Home, William Hague, Michael Howard, John Major, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and the two current claimants for the role; neither of the last two of whom looks like a convincing ‘leader’ by most criteria, although we may of course be proved wrong in time. The only omissions from that list are Harold Macmillan, who at least looked the part and took his country ‘down’ gently; Edward Heath, who had a vision and managed to achieve it – but is scarcely appreciated for it now by most Conservatives; and Winston Churchill, whom the Tories claim for their own but was never their favourite originally, being elevated mainly by Opposition MPs who wanted someone who, despite his many failings, was more firmly anti-Nazi than many other Conservatives to lead them in the War.

And then of course there was Margaret Thatcher; who could be said to have introduced the Führerprinzip into a political society which had never much taken to it in the past, especially of course during Hitler’s war, but which was now beginning to forget those wartime associations. In Thatcher’s case (not Churchill’s) ‘leadership’ became identified with strong, uncompromising government – ‘I stand for leadership, not followership’, ‘the lady’s not for turning’, and so on – as though ‘resolution’ and single-mindedness were the only qualities required in a leader, whatever his or her policies were. And just look at the disastrous outcomes – right now – of that.

Labour I suppose haven’t done much better, although I still rate Attlee and Wilson as the most effective peacetime political leaders of the past century. But that’s because we’re talking about different things here. ‘Leadership’ was not a crucial part of Labour’s political philosophy. Indeed, Wilson bridled at Conservative accusations that he wasn’t enough of a ‘leader’ in the Führer sense. Both Attlee and Wilson were consensual leaders – ‘followers’ also, therefore – who took ‘the people’ where most of them wanted to go. That can’t be said of Truss and Sunak, who aspire to be leaders more in the Thatcher mould, petty and prejudiced, representing minority and indeed ‘extreme’ opinions and interests, with Thatcher’s social, cultural and economic prejudices driving them, her propaganda techniques honed to a new perfection, and riding on a powerful undertow of history which has often been referred to in this blog. How successful or even convincing either of them will turn out to be as ‘Thatchers pour nos jours’ remains to be seen. Neither presently seems to have the ‘character’ for it. And ‘character’ counts, more than policies or competence, or even basic honesty, if you want to win the support of the Tory party, and so come out on top. In Labour’s case it may be different. Attlee after all wasn’t much of a ‘character’ in the Tories’ sense, and Wilson’s efforts to build a ‘character’ – the pipe, for example, when actually he preferred cigarettes – most people saw through at the time.

Johnson, however, exemplified ‘character’ in spades; at least in the sense of ‘Ah, but he’s a character, isn’t he?!’  Indeed, he had barely anything more to recommend him: no vision (except for himself), no thought-through policies, no significant governmental experience, no gravitas, no judgement, no morals (notoriously), and no interest in or empathy for others. Which served him well so long as he offered electoral success to the Tory party, and ‘human interest’ stories to the appalling tabloid press; but that could only last for a while – three years in all. By all other tests of ‘leadership’ he failed abysmally: in uniting his fissiparous party, as Wilson had succeeded in doing; dealing with the major crises of his time (except symbolically, with regard to Ukraine); even in maintaining order in his own official residence, which is probably what ‘did for him’ in the end. And his likely successor – chosen from among those nondescripts whom he chose to serve in his cabinets, and the likeliest of whom is campaigning as the ‘continuity Boris’ candidate, and is as facile if not so funny as him (see my last post) – is unlikely to help.

What would help, of course, is an entirely new left-of-centre government. We can now see clearly that Jeremy Corbyn, for example, was right about almost everything, and that a Labour government continuing his policies would have avoided most of the appalling mistakes that Johnson’s, May’s and Cameron’s governments have made. It might even have gone further – if allowed to by the aforesaid appalling tabloid press – and reformed Britain’s whole governmental and economic systems, unpicking the Thatcher counter-revolution, and so restoring Britain’s proud post-war tradition of social democracy, in order to ensure that nothing like our recent absurdities could happen again. What prevented that in the last few years, of course, was the fact that Corbyn was not seen as a ‘leader’ in the mould that Thatcher had established twenty years before, even by his supporters – like me – whose support was conditional on his restoring Labour to its socialist past, and then passing the baton on to someone whom the Press would find more difficult to rubbish as an old bearded allotment-digging Lefty whom no-one would respect. Unfortunately it turned out that a very large number of – mainly – young people did respect him, boosting party membership by tens of thousands; which made it difficult to replace him in time for the crucial general election that his enemies in the Press (and in his own Party), homing in on the whole ‘leadership’ thing, would ensure he lost. And so we find ourselves (in Britain) where we are today.

This could be seen as another posthumous legacy of Thatcher’s Führerprinzip: both the failure of Labour to furnish a convincing alternative, and of the Conservatives to provide a competent successor to their old Führerin. Let’s hope that neither party – or of course the Lib-Dems – finds a way to solve this problem. We don’t want another Oswald Mosley – Conservative or Labour; he of course was both before he became a Fascist – strutting around the British political scene.

Boris’s lies were pretty outrageous; but Liz seems determined to trump him.  (Ah yes – ‘trump’. What an apt word for it!) In order to appeal to her prospective voters in a general election, and to her immediate electors in the present unedifying contest for Leader of the Conservative Party, and hence for Prime Minister (for the time being), she’s been coming out with some quite enormous fibs recently: not only about the economy, her ludicrously simplistic plans for it (‘lower taxes’), and the supposed achievements of her disgraced predecessor (still beloved by the Tory faithful), but also about her own early life.

In Yorkshire she claims to be a ‘plain-speaking Yorkshire lass’ despite having been born in Oxford and now living in Norfolk; to have been brought up in a Leeds slum and sent to a terrible Comprehensive school there, which is obviously intended to endear her both to the fabled ‘red wall’ in the North and to the public school-educated ‘blue wall’ in the south (a Northerner lifting the lid on State education!), but which obscures the facts that the part of Leeds she lived in was the poshest (average house prices half a million); that her father was a university professor (he’s subsequently disowned her politically); and that her school was ranked ‘excellent’ by Ofsted. (It got her into Oxford, after all – if that means anything.) Now an enthusiastic Brexiter, she also glosses over the fact that she was a leading Remainer until Remain became the losing side, career-wise. All this, and her overwhelming air, at least, of stupidity – or is this simply intended to appeal to the ‘red wall’ too? – and we begin to understand what a first-class charlatan she is. (Does Oxford offer degrees in charlatanry?)

More to the point: does any of this matter, electorally? Boris seemed to show that it doesn’t, for a while at least – just three years in his case. Old Tory members – the present electorate that Liz is appealing to – tend to go not for veracity or honesty, but for (1) what the candidates promise, in the way of tax cuts especially: that’s what most of the discussion and even the headlines in the Tory press have been about; and (2) where they stand on what are called ‘culture war’ issues, like gender and statues, but also including trade unions (boo!), lazy workers (boo!), Lefty lawyers (boo!), academics (boo!), civil servants (boo!), ‘experts’ (boo!), Churchill (hurrah!), Her Maj (hurrah!), Britain’s glorious past (hurrah!), and ‘woke’ – whatever that is; but (boo!) in any case.

It’s these waters that Truss is dipping into for support among the 160,000 Conservative Party members, 51% of whom are all she needs to win over now. Once upon a time her gender might have gone against her, among that misogynistic lot; but since then they’ve had Thatcher – ‘the only one in her cabinet with balls’ (who was it that said that? ) – to re-educate them. More important than that may be the fact that  Liz supported the hyper-masculinist Boris (‘just pat their bottoms’) loyally to the end. That may be her strongest card. That, and possibly the fact that the only alternative to her just now is a darkie (old Tory-speak), although I wouldn’t rely on that so much these days. The present government is pretty multi-ethnic, after all. Class clearly trumps race in British Tory politics; as it always has, I would say.

Whether the carefully-constructed persona that seems likely to take Truss to Number 10 next month will also win her Party the support of the House of Commons, and then of the national electorate in the General Election which will follow a few months afterwards, must be in doubt. Present polling suggests not. Conservative members are hardly a representative bunch of Brits. Their prejudices – even when broadcast widely by the tabloid press – may not mirror the country’s as a whole. And with the new cautious and ‘moderate’ Labour Party poised to snap up the ‘centre’ ground that Truss looks like abandoning, her present strategy may turn out to have been the worst possible for the Tory Party in the longer term. Even those of us on the Left who would prefer Starmer to be more radical (more ‘Corbynite’, if you like) must hope so. It will be a start. And an end to what I’m pretty well convinced will be seen by future historians as the worst ever government in British history, on many grounds; its choice of leaders – Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss – just one (or four) of them.

I didn’t realise how complicated adopting Ukrainian refugees would be. I have a large terrace house in Hull, which I only need to live in about a quarter of, and for part of the year – being in Sweden for the rest – which would ideally suit the family that has just been allotted to me, after several months waiting; and which – apart from the fact that they have no English, and I of course no Ukrainian (we correspond, awkwardly, via Google Translate) – seem a pleasant bunch. They’ve promised to learn English, and will need to, of course, if they’re to have any hope of landing jobs (if they’re allowed to), or the two teenage girls if they’re to cope with an English school. As well as the girls, there’s a mother and a father – aren’t fathers quite rare, being expected to stay behind to defend their motherland? – all from somewhere in the south of Ukraine, but living in the Czech Republic just now; which I assume was their first port of refuge. There are other complications, which I hope won’t injure their claims for refugee status in the UK; but I understand that having a sponsor arranged for them already in Britain (me) will go a long way in their favour. It’s now up to them, and to Priti. (Gulp!)

It’s also up to me to demonstrate that my house is suitable for them, and that I’m a fit and proper person to be taking care of the girls in particular; being as I am one of those most dangerous creatures: a single man. To that end they’re running a ‘DBS’ (standing for Disclosure and Barring Service) check on me: a procedure of which of course I thoroughly approve. To help allay any suspicions on that score, however, I’ve also told the authorities about Kajsa, who will be living in the house with me some of the time; I thought they might be reassured by my having a woman around. But that’s meant that they’ll apparently have to do a DBS check on her too – in Sweden? – which complicates things a little. The other complication is that I can’t show them around my house while I’m abroad; but I hope they’ll let a neighbour do it for me.

It’s odd that having once written a book about mid-19^th-century political refugees in Britain and their reception, I should now be in the position of receiving some 21^st-century refugees into my own home. The situation between then and now is very different, of course. It may surprise people to know that there was very little of today’s anti-alienism in the 1850s – some, but not much, and certainly not directed at refugees; a theme which is explored in my Britain Before Brexit, published a couple of years ago. (Readers may want to correct me on this: Dickens, and so on; but I have the answers for them.)

I’ve never posted on a ‘fan’ site before. But the other day I did. It was on Miriam Margolyes’ fan site. She’s been much in the public eye these days, especially through her outrageous TV interviews, and her recent autobiography.

I had a very early memory of her that I thought her fans would enjoy. As they did: to the tune of over 2,000 ‘likes’ and comments so far. Which she thoroughly deserves: I love her as much as any of her fans do, not only for her acting and humour, but also for her politics – Left, Corbynite, and more pro-Palestinian than many Jews. On the other hand I felt a bit miffed that a rude story about her should get all that appreciation, when my serious posts about the undermining of our liberties and the approachng end of the world get four or five responses, at best.

(Not really, of course. I know how these things work.)

Boris Johnson, as I understand it, was born in New York, which gave him automatic US citizenship. I think I read that he had abandoned that since. If not, however, and even if so, would his American birth entitle him – now he’s about to become jobless in Britain – to offer himself for election as US President; as a further giant step towards his well-known childhood ambition of becoming ‘world king’? Apparently the Americans find the British upper classes quite lovable. Johnson might be a more acceptable idiot there than Trump. And it would mean that we Brits would be properly rid of him. Just a thought.

From an American sympathiser:

https://eand.co/britain-is-self-destructing-and-the-world-should-learn-from-its-lethal-mistakes-63d499c6973c.

Rishi Sunak’s expressed intention to cut down on university courses that don’t lead to profitable employment (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/07/rishi-sunak-vows-to-end-low-earning-degrees-in-post-16-education-shake-up) should be a wake-up call to anyone who values the arts, and anything that can’t be measured in terms of financial gain.

For of course universities are not just utilitarian institutions, but educational ones too; there to broaden minds, stimulate thoughts, encourage criticism (in the positive sense), and – hopefully – to give students an idea of what is really valuable in life. Sunak obviously sees training students in mediaeval history, for example, as a waste of money: both the State’s and – ever since student fees came in – the students’ own. (Thatcher I remember thought the same.) How much a course earns for the people taking it in their post-university careers is all that matters. Put in the investment, and see how it multiplies.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this. Rishi before he turned to politics was a banker – a very rich one; and this is very much a banker’s view: ultra-materialistic and sterile. It also of course fits in with Oscar Wilde’s famous definition of a cynic: someone who ‘knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’. Which could be seen as an apt motto for the now dominant wing of the Conservative Party, the ‘dry’ one, as opposed to Thatcher’s despised ‘wets’. Lastly, and writing as a historian, I see it as continuing a particularly English (perhaps Scottish too) tradition of philistinism, exemplified by the character of the school superintendent Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times (1854): dedicated to ‘facts’ and profit alone, and denigrating ‘fancy’. 

Of course, even in terms of his own priorities Sunak can’t be sure that ‘fanciful’ courses in universities won’t turn out ‘useful’ and even wealthy people in the end. The spark of originality that education, as opposed to training, encourages in people even without directly enriching them, can have unpredictably valuable material effects later on. If Sunak had studied some History at university, even Mediaeval History (he read PPE at Oxford and Business Studies at Stanford), it might have broadened his own mind to look more critically on the conventional capitalist economics he clearly imbibed at his universities, and which seems to be entrapping him now. I’m not sure that Truss would be much of an improvement. She read PPE too.

Is this – to hark back to my last post – to be the pattern our particular British form of ‘fascism’ might take in the future? Conventional capitalism, or what is misleadingly called the ‘free economy’, will be at the heart of it, protected by agencies of oppression; what Anthony Gamble characterised years ago – describing Thatcherism – as ‘the free economy in a strong state’. Limiting university syllabuses to ‘useful’ and earnful subjects, together with all the other tools of incipient authoritarianism – effective censorship, limiting public protest, privatisation of ‘free’ broadcast channels, oppressing immigrants, criminalising anti-Britishness, disregarding inconvenient kinds of expertise, propaganda, distorting history, manipulating voting (Cambridge Analytica), help from Russia, and of course the Daily Mail – could well give the clue to the sort of quasi-fascist society that Britain is about to become.

I realise it reads like scaremongering; but I really do believe that Britain is in danger of falling into the hands of fascists – or neo-fascists, or quasi-fascists if you like, or at the very least proto-fascists – soon. Cassandra, remember, was right.

Of course it won’t be much like the fascist regimes we’ve seen in the past: Nazi Germany especially, which most people seem to take as their paradigm of fascism, despite its gross peculiarities which make it an extreme case. No, there’s little chance that a British dictator will impose a Holocaust on Jews or any other racial or political minority. Even deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda doesn’t quite measure up (or down) to that. ‘We’ – the British – ‘just don’t do that sort of thing’, as one of my readers commented on my blog a few days ago. That may be fair comment in the case of a ‘Holocaust’ – although there are episodes in British colonial and Irish history that must throw some slight doubt on it. But it’s a very unreliable and perhaps even dangerous assumption, if we come to depend on it as our bulwark against any kind of fascism in the future.

In the first place, the fact that something hasn’t occurred in the past doesn’t mean that it can’t occur in the future. Nazism was as unprecedented in Germany in the 1930s as fascism is in Britain today. That is, not entirely unprecedented. Both countries had proto-fascist tendencies earlier, as do most present-day countries; even America. (Especially America, perhaps?) In Britain, some imperialist ideologies came pretty close to it. In any case, the whole ‘we don’t do that’ approach relies on a very static view of history. In reality, countries change. Britain has done, quite a lot, over the past fifty years. (See my new book.) So ‘we don’t do that’ is a very unreliable defence, in any circumstances.

Secondly, there are undoubtedly tendencies now in British politics and society which look likely to augur a kind of fascism. Priti Patel’s monstrous refugee policy is one. Her proposed restrictions on the right of public protest are another. Rishi Sunak’s intention to categorise ‘hatred of Britain’ – present-day Britain, one presumes – as an ‘extreme’ view, to be placed on the same level as ‘terrorism’, is a third. Censorship of critical comedy programmes on TV (‘Mock the Week’) can be added to this list. As can right-wing over-reaction to ‘wokeism’; and Michael Gove’s anti-expertise. All of them betoken a certain degree of authoritarianism, at the very least. As of course does the take-over of the Conservative party by UKIP and the ERG. Most popular (or ‘populist’) newspapers’ descent into sheer right-wing propaganda sheets, abandoning all pretence of objectivity – especially of course the Daily Mail, with its history of openly supporting the original Nazism behind it, and its various hatreds and lies – fuels these Fascist tendencies in British society; to an extent that they could be regarded – as I’ve suggested before – as the epicentre of proto-fascism in Britain, taking on the role that the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei did in pre-war Germany. Who needs a Fascist party when you’ve got the Daily Mail?

Working on an electorate that has been impoverished by government policies over the past 11 years, deceived by neo-liberal propaganda to think that ‘austerity’ will bring it all right again, disappointed by an admittedly grossly slandered (the Daily Mail again) Opposition Labour Party, and unable to express its real democratic preferences by a skewed electoral system: with all this a small minority of right-wing ideologues, a few crazies and more sheer amoralists, armed with millions of money, some of it from Russia, and with some clever new propagandistic tools (‘Cambridge Analytica’), and of course with the billionaire-owned press on their side – have succeeded in subverting what used to be a more (if not perfectly) democratic country to their ends; which – in my view – are the ends demanded by a society in which the inevitable internal contradictions of late capitalism are working themselves out.

Whether these ends are identical with or even closely similar to the ones we have seen in previous manifestations of ‘fascism’ we can’t presently tell. They’re unlikely to produce massacres of whole peoples, or slave labour, or new Oswald Mosleys strutting up and down in imitation of Mussolini or Adolf Hitler – those, I agree, we probably don’t do. But ‘fascism’ can take various forms. One seems to be taking place in Putin’s Russia just now. Eastern European states could go the same way. In Britain it looked to be taking a more ‘cuddly’ form while Boris was still de facto PM. Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak might introduce us to different varieties: less sexist in the former’s case, less racist in the latter’s, and much less reliant on the ‘Führerprincip’, perhaps, in either case. But look at the policies, and some of the rhetoric, and you might get a sniff of what we used to call ‘fascism’ in the past. We’ve been warned against it: by Hilary Clinton, for example, and by hundreds more in the USA. They and I can’t all be scaremongers. I’m on Cassandra’s side, here.