Porter’s Pensées

This bloke again. I’ve just discovered him. He’s really good. (OK. Overstates his case. But still…)

https://eand.co/the-question-of-escaping-a-collapsing-america-86a905f9142a

This guy’s a serious thinker, with a broad view. Mainly USA, but recommended for its analysis of the British situation too; since we abandoned ‘social democracy’ – the great project of Attlee and Wilson – for ‘liberal democracy’ – Thatcher through to Boris and Brexit. ‘Late-stage’ capitalism, of course. His description of the ‘nastiness’ of present-day Britain (or England) is spot on.

My only hope now – as a ‘Dual’ – is that Sweden keeps to the old faith.

https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-world-country-db9829323a9a

Ain’t dat de trut’? And ain’t it a shame (for me) that my new book – Britain’s Contested History. Lessons for Patriots: bang on the topic, as the subtitle hints – isn’t quite out yet to illustrate and amplify the point?

Not in print form, anyway, A correspondent tells me it might be published already as an e-book. I’ll check with the publishers.

Yes, Swedish TV did report the Jubilee celebrations the other night, cheering patriots and all; and with a reprise of the original coronation of seventy years ago – golden carriage, golden crown, golden everything. OK, so we Brits do this kind of overblown flummery well, if that’s what turns you on. I doubt whether any other nation can compete with us in this line; except perhaps the USA. I asked Kajsa how it compared with Carl XVI Gustav’s coronation in 1973. She couldn’t remember it. From what I gather, talking to other Swedes at a party last night, he simply swore an oath to his government in private, to be a good social-democratic boy, and then was given the keys to his castles. No pomp and circumstance at all – or none that Kajsa could recall.

If you’re going to have a monarchy – and the major drawback of a directly-elected President to my mind is that it might land us with someone like Trump, or a favourite comedian, or Boris Johnson for that matter – then this is the kind of monarchy you want. Keep the hereditary aspect, roughly: restricting your choice to Windsors; but sack all the marginal freeloaders – younger sons, daughters, cousins, uncles; make the other royal relatives do proper jobs; take away most of their palaces, their silly clothes, and all those medals they’ve never actually earned – and have them living as much like their ‘subjects’ as is possible. (OK, perhaps just a little better. We don’t want them resorting to foodbanks.) It might also be good to restrict your choice to people who don’t actually want to be king or queen, although that might prove difficult; and to have them dragged to their throne, like Speakers of the House of Commons are symbolically dragged to their chair. One other desideratum might be that they should have disabilities of some kind that could be seen to put them at least on a ‘level’ with their subjects, and so curb their royal arrogance. Carl Gustav is shy and dyslexic. George VI of Britain, of course, had a severe stammer, which was what always commended him to me – a serious stutterer in my youth. As it happens I’ve met – briefly – both Elizabeth II and the Swedish Crown Princess Victoria, and been impressed by their naturalness and lack of arrogance; and in Liz’s case by her intelligence (we talked about America), which surprised me in view of my prejudice at the time that all royals were brain-dead inbreds. Liz II has done a remarkable job over the past 70 years in seeming pretty ‘ordinary’, despite the luxury in which she lives, and despite her family problems – which are perhaps a sign of ‘ordinariness’ in themselves (there must be other families with ‘nonces’ in them) – and in giving offence to virtually no-one.  

So although I shan’t be celebrating her jubilee – no street parties in Kantarellvägen – I shall be tolerating it. And hoping that whoever succeeds her – the poor bastard: it must be a rotten job – can maintain the tradition she has set, and perhaps succeed in downsizing the whole excessive, vulgar and tasteless institution.

I’m trying to interest newspapers in short articles to whet the appetite for my new book when it comes out next month. I’m told they should ideally be hooked on to news items of the day. So here’s one I’ve sent to the Indy. No reply yet!

A government push to boost the use imperial measurements after Brexit will bring British “culture” back into shops, a minister has claimed. (Independent 31 May.)

‘British culture’, eh? As if that can be measured in pounds and ounces. Or in acres, rods, poles, perches, gallons, pints, shillings, half-crowns and pence. Really the ‘culture wars’ have sunk pretty low, haven’t they, if that’s the best they can come up with? At most it appeals to a superficial sort of nostalgia, which has very little to do with the essentials of the national history the nostalgists [ed: is that a word?] clearly want to return to.

Such reactionary musings – which were a factor in the Brexit debate too – are scarcely surprising, considering the losses that people feel they have suffered over the last couple of decades or so. For some – those whom Jeremy Paxman has colourfully dubbed the ‘harrumphers’ – it was nostalgia for the days when Britain was supposed to have ‘ruled half the world’, and only comprised ‘white’ people. For others it was a longing for the security and promise of Labour’s welfare state, whose erosion since Thatcher’s time seemed to be leaving them at the mercy of cruel ‘market forces’.

But if they really want to return to the past, the nostalgists need to get their history right. At present it relies on selective and superficial memories of a past that was far more complex and contested than they make it seem. For example: Britain has always been multicultural, as well of course as multi-national; religiously divided; riven by class and gender; with both capitalist and socialist traditions, and even Fascist (certainly proto-fascist) elements in its politics; republican as well as royalist; deeply divided by wealth and education; imperial, of course – that ‘half the world’ boast: wrong, of course, and in any case a trait Britain shared with most other European countries – but also anti–imperial: an ideology that could even be said to have been invented by the British, as imperialism was not. And that’s not to mention the darker sides of Britain’s past, which the nostalgists might not want to revive (or would they?): like capital and corporal punishment, unnecessary wars, colonial atrocities, institutionalised racism and sexism, and dull English food.

And while they’re at it, nostalgists might like to take on board certain other values that were once thought to be essentially and exclusively ‘British’, but are less recognised or celebrated today. These include welcoming immigrants indiscriminately; the absolute right of asylum; probity and honesty in government; genuine press freedom; internationalism (all those ‘citizens of nowhere’ Theresa May was so dismissive of); and the absence of ‘continental’ methods of policing: especially espionage.

Blue (or blue-ish) passports and pounds and ounces, surely, are as nothing compared to these. Which is not to say that any of them should be privileged over any of the others, by those who want to take Britain ‘back’; but only that ‘British culture’, even rooted in its history, goes beyond pounds and ounces, and is more complex and contentious, and in some ways more modern, than nostalgists tend to assume.

I’m sorry, but as well as thoughts about little subjects like politics, architecture, spies, cricket and imperialism, I’m most of my time just now taken up with BIG thoughts; albeit with my tiny mind, which is why I don’t usually broadcast them. It all comes, I think, from my boyhood immersion in the Eagle’s ‘Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future’, and a sporadic diet of cerebral Science Fiction from then on: most recently the astonishing works of Cixin Liu. (Thanks, Ken, for introducing him to me.)

I sometimes think that any other concerns, problems, ambitions or loves that I or any of us may have pale into insignificance against our awareness of the vastness of the cosmos, and the thought that – for example – in just a few million years we shall all plunge into the sun. That’s why I actually – and uncharacteristically for a Leftie – applaud the efforts of capitalists like Elon Musk spending their ill-gotten millions venturing into space; if only to make the first steps towards saving the great achievements of human civilisation – music, poetry, art, the great cathedrals – in perpetuity, somewhere in the universe. I can’t stand the idea of Mozart’s not being for ever. If we have to go – humanity, that is – we must make sure that some at least of our best works, the things that in my view justify us as a species, have been hurled deeply enough into space to be picked up by aliens somewhere and at some time in the future, and so preserved. Otherwise why bother to paint, compose, build, sculpt, write novels and plays; or even, I suppose – though I don’t make great claims for these – history books. (So far as I’m concerned, the sun can have mine.)

Or will the internet do this for us? Will intelligent Proxima Centaurians be able to pick today’s Youtube up?…

(This post, incidentally, was stimulated by a scientific – not SF – piece I read on the internet this morning: https://bigthink.com/13-8/humans-universe/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB. But that is so off-topic by comparison with my usual posts that it probably won’t interest other subscribers to this blog. Sorry again.)

For people who live in the same country continuously, and never even read about ‘abroad’, the situation in their own country must appear normal. So it won’t occur to them that certain institutions they’ve grown up with are in fact highly ‘peculiar’ (to use the word sometimes applied to American slavery), and so not to be accepted unthinkingly. Britain currently has two institutions that fit that description, and which have, fortuitously or not, come together in the person of Boris Johnson.

Her first ‘peculiar institution’ is the (so-called) ‘Public’ school, with Eton college its most prominent example, and the trend-setter for the rest. Johnson of course is one of Eton’s alumni. The second peculiarity is the British popular press, which is widely regarded as one of the least ‘free’ in the world, and is ‘peculiar’ in the control exerted over it by right-wing millionaires, and its abandonment of objective news-reporting for blatant propaganda. Johnson, fresh out of Eton, was a journalist – of the ‘commenting’ kind, not an honest reporter – before he went into politics. So Britain’s two ‘peculiar institutions’ coalesce in him, quite uniquely. (Other Public school-educated Prime Ministers have done the occasional bit of journalism – Palmerston comes to mind – but not as their main professions.) Many people don’t fully realise how ‘peculiar’ – and peculiarly British – these institutions are.

The problem with the Public schools, of course, is that they distance their privileged products from the real world, and perpetuate values (Bullingdon?) which may be inimical to society generally. Popular journalism privileges style, controversy and sensation over substance, and actively encourages distortion and lying if they can be used to pursue propagandistic ends. ‘Exercising power without responsibility’, was how an earlier Conservative PM once put it; ‘the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’ In other words, it can influence people without being held accountable for that influence.

As it happens there are a number of newspaper columnists I read and admire, especially if I share their prejudices; but I wouldn’t trust any of them – even the ones I agree with – to rule over me. (Or even bloggers, like me.) Luckily, before Johnson none of them did. Now our current Old Etonian and ex-Telegraph journalist PM reveals the dangers implicit in giving over the reins of power to someone schooled in these two ways. He’s an acknowledged disaster. We like to blame him for it; but our ‘peculiar institutions’ must share much of that blame.

On the other hand, Johnson could also be said to mirror a particular kind of ‘Britishness’; with Eton and the tabloid press (plus the Telegraph) reflecting characteristically and almost exclusively British values, in ways that most other allegedly ‘patriotic’ institutions – Crown, Parliament, the Church of England, the Empire – do (or did) not. In this sense he could be said to be the most ‘British’ prime minister we’ve ever had. True ‘patriots’, take note.

Back in Sweden – and how good it is to be in a country where everything still works! My medical practice in Hull doesn’t. Taken over recently by a ‘Group’, with its phone centre in Wales or somewhere, I found it impossible to get even an internet appointment with a doctor. Over here I got one in a few minutes; and very helpful she was. Don’t let anyone tell you that Britain’s free NHS is the best in the world. It may have been once; and if it were properly funded now, allowed to take its pre-Brexit EU medical staff back, and not being subtly prepared for privatisation and profit, it might be again. Nowadays the Swedish healthcare system – almost cost-free for patients – outshines it glaringly.

It seems to be the same with everything. At Manchester Airport they closed all the restaurants and bars at 6 p.m. (my flight took off at 8), so I had to exist on a packet of crisps. Maybe the persistence of Covid was to blame for this – bar staff falling ill, etc. – but at Arlanda they were still working. Being here now is like returning to civilisation after living in a city bombed by the Russians. Well, not quite; and I’m aware that my complaints are pretty petty compared with what they’re suffering in Ukraine. (They would probably be grateful for a packet of crisps.) But the contrast really is striking. I feel I’m back to normality. Britain is anything but ‘normal’ just now.

Its politics, of course, is so abnormal as to make you wonder if it isn’t just being put on as a ‘show’. The government front bench is full of showmen (and women) whom BT Barnum would surely have immediately signed up if he had been around now. Boris the fat clown, Jacob the thin one, Priti the evil witch, Nigel the frog in the background…. it would go down a treat in a circus. And does, I have to admit, with me; I find myself watching ‘Parliament TV’ in fascination whenever something like ‘Partygate’ is programmed. It’s Kajsa, accustomed as she is to a soberer kind of politics, who has suggested to me that the whole thing might be intended as ‘entertainment’, rather than as serious debate. And her view of British politics appears – from the limited sample of my Swedish friends – to be fairly typical here, and probably in the EU as a whole.

Which brings me on to my final and more general point. Do Boris and his government care? They must be aware of the ridicule into which they have dragged the nation whose reputation in the world they profess to value. Most political leaders would like themselves and their countries to be ‘respected’ abroad: that is, either admired (Sweden) or feared (Putin’s Russia). Being ignored (most other countries) isn’t the worst of alternatives; but being portrayed as a pathetic joke of a place must surely be. Johnson counters this with meaningless airy boasts – ‘global’ Britain, excelling at just about everything – but he can’t believe much of it, and must know that no-one outside the country, and indeed his own constituency of voters, is fooled. Again: does this matter to him, as for a ‘patriot’ it surely should? Or is he prepared yet to take on the Millwall mantra: ‘everyone hates us and we don’t care’? There’s a certain element of pride, even dignity, about that. But are Boris – and the rest of us – ready for it?

A week or so ago a Tory MP asserted in Parliament that there would be no need for food banks if only the poor would learn to cook and shop for themselves. Their problem, he asserted, was that in this age of pre-prepared meals and takeaways most of them had never been taught to manage their money, or to cook nutritious meals from basic ingredients. He then went on – unwisely, as it turned out – to claim that one could prepare a complete meal in this way, without bothering the food banks, or rummaging around in rubbish bins, for 30 pence a go.  30 pence! Challenged on this, attempts were made to justify it by offering recipes for nutritious 30p. meals: the most convincing of which was thought to be baked beans on toast; until it was pointed out that the costing made no allowance for heating – so it would have had to be cold beans on soggy bread. But maybe that was all the poor deserved. Another MP claimed that the simple answer to poverty was for the working poor to stop complaining and ‘get better jobs’. Again, evidence of just how out of touch the Conservatives are, at this time of recession, price inflation, poor wages and the lowest state pensions in Europe.

But it was ever thus, in always deeply socially-divided Britain. Of course our ‘upper’ classes – especially the private-school educated ones – can have no idea of how it is to live on benefits or minimum wages. (Jacob Rees-Mogg recently admitted that he had never shopped for groceries or cooked a meal for himself in his life. He seemed to take pride in it.) Blaming the poor for their poverty – rather than governments, bankers, hedge-fund investors (like Rees-Mogg) and the like – is an attitude that goes back to the cruel Victorian Poor Laws, justifying condemning the ‘undeserving’ indigent to prisons (called ‘workhouses’: ‘arbeit macht frei’?) as their only alternative to starvation and death. Workhouses are no more, unless you count the actual prisons; but the attitude that lay behind their creation survives. Some argue it was actually part of the rationale behind George Osborne’s policy of deliberate – rather than necessary – ‘Austerity’: to put the blame for it on to the heads of the people who would suffer from it the most. ‘Get on your bikes!’ Remember that piece of 1980s Tebbitry? It’s still here (in Britain; not so much in Sweden, I think): and as fetid and rank-smelling as always.

So Sweden is joining NATO at last, after decades of studied refusal, and centuries of principled and proud neutrality; which makes the decision of her governing Social Democratic Party, to be confirmed by Parliament today (I think), a truly ‘historic’ one. I was never entirely happy with her traditional policy, believing that the effective maintenance of peace depends on mutual alliances, and knowing how imperfect and one-sided Sweden’s neutrality had been in World War II. But I respected it in principle, and because in any war situation it is valuable to have one or two neutral countries for refugees (in that case Jews) to flee to, and where diplomatists from both sides could meet. So I was never as critical as might have been expected from someone born in the middle of the great London Blitzkrieg (just a few miles from baby me in Hornchurch), when Britain could have done with all the help she could find in order to prevent Nazism from overrunning Europe; including – presumably – Sweden.

The change of mind in Sweden has been rapid, and huge. And of course it has been the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has brought it on. Sweden, remember, is very near to Russia, and Finland even closer, sharing an 800 km border with her. Both countries have been in direct confrontation with Russia in the past. In very recent years Russian military airplanes have been spotted violating Swedish and Finnish airspace, and Russian subs hiding in the Stockholm Archipelago (where Kajsa and I have our sommarhus). Military personnel and equipment are being shipped over to Gotland, the island between Sweden and the ex-Soviet and so under-threat Baltic States. People are being advised to stock up their cellars in preparation for an attack, and Kajsa has bought a wind-up radio in case the electricity fails. No-one really believes war will come, I think; but these preparations may explain why opinion here has turned towards NATO in recent weeks. Putin will take it as evidence that NATO has designs on Russia; but from Svartsö (our island) the main threat appears the other way.

Of course Putin’s paranoia has some basis to it, in the indications that NATO has given that it would like to expand further into Russia’s traditional ‘sphere of influence’, in ways that could be interpreted as aggressive and, indeed, ‘imperialistic’. One of the great problems with NATO is that it is so dependent on, and thus dominated by, the USA, whose grossly ‘imperialistic’ instincts in the recent past are plain for all to see.

Which may open up an opportunity for Sweden and Finland, when they do eventually become members of NATO, to pull the organisation back from the USA, and to re-establish it as the unambiguously defensive alliance it was originally intended to be. Indeed, that seems to me to be an ideal rôle for Sweden to take on, in view of her 200 years of neutrality and pacifism. It might be easier for her to do this from inside NATO, than from without. That is, if Putin – in ‘retaliation’ – doesn’t bomb Svartsö first.