Porter’s Pensées

Read, mark, learn and get angry.

https://eand.co/the-idiot-who-ruined-britain-a62542447f92

I wonder whether the current nightmare the British are suffering under Boris will get them any closer to the abolition of his ‘Public’ school, and of the rest of them? It certainly ought to. As a result of the inanities of Boris and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and before them of the smooth David Cameron, Eton College has become a laughing stock among the general public, who are beginning to question not only whether it doesn’t give an unfair and undemocratic social advantage to those whose parents can afford to send them there – we’ve always known that – but also whether the academic education it prides itself on is really up to scratch.

Most of it appears to be heavily based on the Greek and Roman ‘classics’, which can test memory but not necessarily intelligence, and which of course can have almost no relevance at all to the present day. (Sorry, Mary Beard!) I’ve written to the guy at Eton who appears to be in charge of ‘History’ there, asking him how much modern history they teach, but without getting a reply. I can’t see any modern history either in Eton’s published syllabus. I can only conclude that History for them stops in around 400 AD; which may help explain Rees-Mogg’s recent book on The Victorians, which the Daily Telegraph reviewer (no less) characterised as a ‘clichéd, lazy history’ that ‘often reads like it was written by a baboon’. (For the range of reviews of this book, nearly all of them awful, see https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/19/jacob-rees-mogg-book-the-victorians-12-titans-who-forged-britain.) Boris’s ventures into history are hardly any better.

The ‘great’ Public schools, however, never claimed to be tops at academic education, which generally came very low in their list of priorities. Intellectual pupils – ‘swots’ – were often bullied. Heroes were the ‘sporty’ ones, or ‘jocks’. The schools mainly existed – overtly, anyway – to develop ‘character’, among boys who would grow up to be ‘leaders’, either at home or in the Empire. In the 19^th century ‘character’ embraced a number of qualities, including honesty, bravery, selflessness, modesty, and the old feudal principle of noblesse oblige: doing good for those ‘beneath’ them, socially. I always had a sneaking admiration for them historically, and even imperially; at their best (and they weren’t always at their best) they served to rub down the sharp edges of capitalist exploitation in the colonies, and so to preserve the illusion that imperialism was a selfless and humanitarian enterprise. That was one of the major roles of the Public schools then.

But of course it wasn’t to last. The need for noblesse oblige largely disappeared with the fall of the Empire, and as the resurgence of free marketism – the mortal enemy of all the old feudal values – crushed it under Thatcher. (The noblesse were her ‘wets’.) Which left the Public schools without their previous moral and social justifications (if I’m right about these), and relying now only on the husk of ‘prestige’ that they had built up during their golden age, with its real value hollowed out. They became simply hives of privilege, for those whose parents were rich enough to afford them, and who were therefore unlikely to want their sons educated in ‘obliging’ ways that might strike at the sources of their richesse. The schools lost their souls; with Boris being one of the results: privileged, self-regarding, amoral, dishonest and dim.

Eton must bear some responsibility for this. The whole country would benefit enormously from the destruction of this school, and others like it, and of their post-imperial spawn.

Another dead cat! And the biggest and deadest so far. Not that I’m disputing that there’s a dangerous crisis emerging on the Russia-Ukraine border; but Boris is obviously using it just now to divert attention from his own problems, which he can paint as a distraction in themselves from these much weightier matters.

That seems to be his and his allies’ main line of defence currently: that it’s his critics who are trivialising politics by concentrating on his ‘parties’, rather than on the ‘big’ decisions: which he has always ‘got right’. That, of course, is a lie in itself (see the recent cross-parliamentary committee report on the government’s initial response to Covid); but in Boris’s post-truth world the mere claim is the only thing that matters. (He’s still maintaining that his government is building forty new hospitals, and that the infamous slogan on the side of the Brexit ‘battle-bus’ was justified.)

This latest ruse – the Ukrainian one – is risible because, as well as obviously using the crisis to get him out of a hole, he’s implying that a phone call from him to Putin, followed by a visit to Moscow by Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, can have any influence on the situation at all. That might cut some ice with what Jeremy Paxman has called the ‘harrumphers’ in the Conservative party, still clinging on to the tatters of their old imperial ermine; but it comes over as ridiculous – even embarrassing – to those of us who have reconciled ourselves (quite happily) to Britain’s having become just an ordinary nation once again: and even more ordinary now she’s left the EU. On her own, Britain can have almost no positive influence on world affairs. Will Putin even bother to take Boris’s call?

On Johnson’s lies generally, and the wider damage they are doing to Britain’s governmental processes, Jonathan Freedland has an excellent piece in today’s Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/28/sue-gray-report-britain-liar-met-police-partygate-report. ‘Partygate’ is not trivial – just to do with parties. The culture it reveals is fundamentally destructive of good government, and of people’s acceptance of the same. It has the same malignant effect on democracy as a lie can have on a marriage. In other words, his lying is the ‘invisible worm’ at the heart of Blake’s sick Rose. Which is one reason – of many – why Boris has to go.

Proof reading. The most boring of all literary activities, but thankfully finished yesterday, and the corrections sent in. So now I can’t add or change anything; which is a huge relief, even though I know that ideas will keep coming to me which ought to be included, and events happen in the next few weeks which might cause me to rethink what I’ve already written. I’ve tried to hedge my bets on – for example – Boris’s fate over the next few days or weeks (or even hours?), and on future prospects for the country more generally. It’s no part of a historian’s duty to predict in any case. We know better than most how many predictions have come croppers in the past. (The longevity of the British Empire was one.)

Who would have thought, for example, that it would be a party that would prove Boris’s nemesis – if indeed it does (I’m not predicting) – after all his other egregious failings, stupidities and political sins? I imagine this is because it brings into the equation human interest stories that are the main diet of the popular press, and of far more concern to its readers than big and really important political events, like Brexit and the upcoming – possibly: again, no predictions – Russia-Ukraine war. Stories of ‘ordinary’ people having to say their tearful goodbyes to dying relatives through windows, while their censorious rulers are flouting the rules and living it up in Whitehall, and then laughing about it, are bound to strike home, more sharply than almost anything. It’s the perfect mesh of the personal and the political. Couldn’t the government have predicted this?

Incidentally, here in Sweden we’re seeing Swedish warships in the Stockholm Archipelago. How far away is Ukraine from us?

Partygate got full coverage in the Swedish media again today, with scenes in the Commons shown on SVT delighting those here who always suspected that Monty Python was fact. In tomorrow’s Dagens Nyheter Katrine Marçal, the paper’s excellent London correspondent, bemoans the fact that it all seemed to be about Johnson, and none of it about politics, which is what the Swedish parliament usually concerns itself with. She also thinks it won’t matter much to Johnson, because it plays to people’s fond perceptions of him in any case. He relishes the role of ‘distraction’.

Which made me wonder whether in fact he might be the latest and most cunning of  Lynton Crosby’s ‘dead cats’, thrown on to the table deliberately (see https://bernardjporter.com/2022/01/14/a-line-of-dead-cats/), in order to take our attention away from the direr things going on underneath it: especially Priti Patel’s dismantling of our liberties, and Nadine Dorris’s threats to the BBC. Now that would be clever. Is Boris aware?

Is it true? It’s widely reported that there’s a plot afoot to rescue Boris from the mess he’s got himself  into, and to save his premiership from what threatens to be its rapid, ignominious and well-deserved end, to which the code-name ‘Operation Save Big Dog’ has been given: the title suggested, apparently, by Boris himself. From what can be gathered the plot consists of waiting for it all to ‘blow over’; putting all the blame on his underlings, and sacking some of them; polishing up and presenting what can be seen as some of his recent achievements (‘getting’ Brexit and the vaccine roll-out ‘done’); and putting forward some new ‘populist’ measures – cutting lockdown so that people can party, stationing troops on the south coast to deter immigrants, perhaps a bit of money for covid-sufferers, and some juicy ‘culture’ bones for his extreme right-wingers – to lure the ‘red wall’ back into the Big Dog’s embrace. If these don’t work, then of course there’s the ‘dead cat’ strategy (see last post). Or does he have something else up his sleeve?

Of course the most likely thing to ‘Save Big Dog’, at least in the short-medium term, is the fact that he has no obvious successor in the government – or even in his party – who has any ability or dignitas at all. Truss? Gove? Sunak (perhaps)? He sacked all the most experienced and competent of them before the last election, in order to over-promote the callow young (or youngish) Brexiters whose loyalty he thought he could rely on to see him through. Most of the most able Tory MPs were pro-Europeans. That leaves no-one for the Party to turn to, to do a good job of leadership, while at the same time keeping the Brexit flag flying still.

Well, we’ll see. In the meantime, I’m left wondering who really thought up that ‘Save Big Dog’ slogan. It seems awfully arrogant for the man himself. It sounds like something Carrie calls him in bed. ‘Come and snuggle up, you lovely big dog, you!’ Maybe, to win the voters back for hubby, she’s got another baby up her sleeve. (Or somewhere.) No, that wouldn’t do it.

Labour must be secretly hoping that he does survive. Just at present he’s an electoral liability for the Tories, who are ten points in the rear. And the next scheduled election isn’t for two years.

First there was Brexit. That didn’t go very well, did it? But then along came Covid 19, to take our attention away from all that. The Government handled that badly too: incompetently and corruptly; so we needed a distraction from that. That’s when brave Prince Andrew stepped in, to hog the front pages with his (alleged) misdemeanors, and then his (un-) dressing down: his ‘HRH’ and ill-gotten medals falling off him like autumn leaves. This is the story currently. But people will soon get bored of that too; and so we have today’s new scandal: a Chinese spy, for pity’s sake. Spies always steal headlines, although this one doesn’t seem terribly significant, except to the Right-wing tabloids, because of her alleged – but in fact risible – relations with the Labour Party.

So, we have a sequence of supposed scandals, each one distracting popular attention from the one before. And in fact Brexit itself could be regarded as a distraction from the much more serious scandal that preceded and should overshadow all of them: our political leaders’ failure to respond adequately to climate change.

You’ll remember the Australian propagandist and amoralist Lynton Crosby’s ‘dead cat’ political strategy? If there’s a problem, throw a dead cat on to the table in order to get everyone talking about that instead. I’m not claiming that Covid was a deliberate distraction; but this has been its effect. And the other ones could have been deliberate: except that Johnson doesn’t seem clever enough to think of them.

Perhaps the arch-amoralist Dominic Cummings had a part in them? Not in order to protect Brexit, necessarily, and certainly not Boris; but to divert attention from the other key development in British politics today: which is the trend – scarcely noticed beneath all these distractions – towards a form of authoritarianism. Which seems to be his baby.

PS. By the way, Bojo and Partygate got the full treatment on Swedish TV News this evening. I felt quite proud.

One would imagine that Boris will need to go very soon.  It must be remembered that many of his backbenchers have distrusted him for years: ‘Boris will always let you down’, as a retiring Tory MP told me was the almost universal feeling among his colleagues before the last General Election. (I may have quoted this before.)

We’ve all known about his enormous failings of character and of personal morality, which indeed were noticed when he was a boy, and reported to his parents by one of his masters at Eton (I’ve quoted that, too). There are at least half-a-dozen books about his flaws, especially his penchant for lying. There’s no excuse for the cognoscenti (who include Conservative politicians) not being aware of all this. ‘The people’ may have remained ignorant, and seduced by what many have described as his ‘PG Wodehouse’ characteristics. It was this supposed appeal to the populace that persuaded the Tory Party to select him as their leader and prime ministerial candidate in 2019, in the belief – quite justified, as it turned out – that an older and fatter Bertie Wooster might appeal – more than the slimmer and deadly serious Corbyn – to the politically unlettered and to the aficionados of TV comedy programmes.

Having won the election for them, but with his obvious stupidity, superficiality, lack of judgment and gross immorality only now clearly affecting both his appeal to the people (‘one law for them…’) and his direction of the country, many Tories know that it’s time for him to go; having done his job for his party in 2019. Of course he has weathered personal crises like this before, generally by ladling on the ‘charm’. But can that take him any further in 2022?

I’ve written before about Johnson’s personal flaws, especially the lies. Then I wondered whether personal immorality, generally speaking, could really be a determining factor when it comes to national politics. Soon we may know.

Colonialism and imperialism at the present time are usually discussed in very simplistic moral terms. Are you – and the books written about them – ‘for’ or ‘against’? The fall-back position for most commentators is that imperialism was an unrelieved evil, responsible for many if not all of today's problems in places like Africa. Hence my interest, as an imperial historian, in this contribution to a blogsite I subscribe to (USA Africa Dialogue), by an African scholar, Oluwatoyin Adepoju, dealing with some of the questions about colonialism that ought to be asked.

If Africans were not colonised, what would have been the implications for scribal literacy, which was low on the continent?

If Africans were not colonised, what would have been the implications for the unquestioned dominance of classical African religions, as opposed to the greater pluralism, the range of choices, opened  up by the current co-existence of these religions and  Christianity?

Without passing through the colonial experience, would we be using an international language, English and chatting on the Internet?

All contemporary Africans are shaped by colonialism, particularly poignantly so those deeply invested in the globally dominant educational system, which has its origins in Europe and has little input in its methods  and understanding of reality from learning systems from other cultures. 

Would any such person prefer a classical African education to the Western one? Under what circumstances, outside the forceful coercion of colonialism,  would an informed choice between them or to integrate them have been possible?

Colonisation birthed the Universities of Ibadan and Makere, for example, pioneers in post-classical African scholarship, more critically oriented, more international in range of reference and communicative scope, than the earlier classical African systems of Ifa, among others. 

Is the current challenge not  one of synergy between these systems?

The creative possibilities represented by these  developments are  possible without colonisation but colonisation is the historical trajectory through which they emerged.

Ursula le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels visualise encounters between a space faring Terran civilisation and non-technological cultures, in which the Terrans are scrupulous about not interfering in the local culture on the planets they find themselves.

Its also true, I think, that Africans were visiting Europe before colonisation.

How best could we have benefited from what Europe had to offer, without having to pass through the still reverberating agonies of colonisation?

Perhaps I need to understand the colonial experience better. While not justifying the self serving so called civilising  missions of the colonisers, I think colonialism in Africa and perhaps Asia needs to be appreciated in more complex terms than that of binary good and evil.

A painful journey but one whose every segment is vital, in my view.

(I've finished the copy-editing phase of 'the book'. But yesterday, just an hour or two later, being asked by a Swedish friend of Kajsa's what the book was about, I couldn't for the life of me remember. Dementia? Or simply a reaction to the months of work that went into it? - Now I need to write a press article to accompany the book's publication in the early summer. This is my first sketch.)

Why a ‘patriot’ would need to feel any kind of ‘pride’ in the history of his or her country is a mystery to me. In most cases – unless the aforesaid patriots are comparatively old, and played a significant part in the events and achievements they so admire – none of that history can be credited to them. Very few of them have had any choice over where they live and were brought up, even, unless they are expatriots or immigrants, in which case they might justifiably take some pride in where they have chosen to live; so long, that is, as it’s because of those nations’ virtues, and not simply because they were the only countries they were allowed in to, or to exploit. (The more ‘racist’ kind of ‘native’ patriot might baulk at that.)

As well as this, countries change, and people’s views of their virtues, too; so that – for example – pride in conquering other countries in the past – Rome, and of course the British Empire – might seem less of a virtue in less imperialistic times. If I could ever allow myself to take on this kind of historical ‘pride’, in my case it would more likely attach itself to Britain’s anti-imperialist traditions than to her acquisition of colonies all over the world. But I’d rather not take any credit for that, either; except for the part I played in my early life protesting against South African apartheid, the Kenyan ‘emergency’, and the like. And that didn’t amount to much. (Mainly marching and shouting.) So, pride in – and even, conversely,  shame towards – one’s national history is simply nonsensical. ‘It wasn’t me, guv. I wasn’t there at the time.’

In any case, your nation shouldn’t need to have had a ‘virtuous’ history for you to feel patriotic towards it. Some years ago when I was teaching at an American university (Rochester, NY), a student told me of a Republican neighbour of his who had asked him why he was studying British history. ‘America’, he went on, ‘has the best history in the world!’ Most of us would probably dispute that: either its placing of the US at the top of the moral (or whatever) hierarchy of nations; or its implied view that only the ‘best’ nations need to be studied by historians; or its assumption that America has a ‘history’ that is immutable; or of course on all these grounds. Most countries’ histories are ‘mixed’, changeable, and controversial. That’s what makes studying them so challenging, so enlightening and therefore useful, and also – for us scholars – such fun. 

Nor, surely, is a pride in your country’s past a necessary desideratum for ‘patriotism’. Swedish school students are taught to admire their country for its aspirations, not its history: which was, it has to be said, somewhat chequered before the Social Democrats got in. Britain is entirely different, on the political Right at least, in seeking to base its people’s patriotism on its past. That’s why earlier ‘heroes’ so often come up in ‘patriotic’ accounts of Britain: King Alfred, Drake, Churchill, Gladstone, Emily Pankhurst (at a pinch); and great victories – the Armada, World War I, World War II, the 1966 World Cup; as well as heroic failures (which we may be rather better at), like the Charge of the Light Brigade, Scott at the South Pole, and Dunkirk. Not all these heroes and their deeds have survived the critical attentions of later historians unscathed (viz. Churchill); but the fact that Brits need to have a past to be ‘proud’ of is the most telling thing.

Of course the impression we’re given in Britain of ‘unchanging’ traditions must be one of the reasons for the appeal of the ‘past’ as a focus of patriotism; dressed up as it is in the clothes of the past – literally in the cases of lords, judges and Eton schoolboys, including the top-hatted Jacob Rees-Mogg – in order to give an impression of immutability. Of course this is highly misleading. Clothes don’t ‘maketh the man’, or the woman; as neither do names and titles. The ‘Conservative Party’ for example hasn’t wanted to ‘conserve’ anything (except its members’ privileges) since Thatcher’s time; the Labour Party no longer represents horny-handed labour; ‘Public’ schools are no longer either public or the repository of the good old ‘noblesse oblige’ values that preceded capitalism, and might be said to justify them; football is no longer the ‘people’s game’ – and so on. But they give the impression of having endured for aeons, and to be worthy of ‘patriotic’ respect for that reason. 

But surely a genuine patriot would want to make his country better; into a ‘New Jerusalem’, rather than insisting on our allegiance to an old – and highly misleading – one: ‘our island story’, or ‘flag and queen’, as a newly-elected Conservative MP (Lia Nici) put it recently. She thought that anyone who wasn’t ‘proud’ of these two symbols ‘should move to another country they prefer’. Well, I’ve done that, albeit for other reasons too; and without my abandoning what I still regard as my fond and even patriotic feelings towards many aspects of my country of birth. (Shakespeare and cricket are the two things that still bind me to the place. Other patriots will choose other foci. But not, please, ‘Flag and Queen’.)