Porter’s Pensées

One of the BBC’s chief selling points is that it is, or endeavours to be, ‘impartial’.  In yesterday’s Guardian, however, its chairman (Richard Sharp) was quoted as saying that this wasn’t a selling point at all; that people didn’t really want impartiality in their news broadcasts, but rather ‘provocation and sensation’, leaning them towards ‘more entertaining partisan outlets such as Rupert Murdoch’s expected Talk-TV.’ On the letters page of the same issue of the Guardian there were appeals to Keir Starmer to dumb down Labour’s appeal to the electorate, replacing the ‘counternarrative to whatever the Tory project is’, couched in ‘the deadening language of abstraction’, with ‘the effective use of short phrases’ to win voters over. That’s the Tories’ way, after all; and look how well it’s done for them. The underlying assumption behind all this is that ‘the people’ are too – what? ignorant? uninterested? lazy? misled? stupid? (please don’t say that) – to be able to cope with ‘impartiality’ and rational argument; and hence to make sensible choices when it comes to elections and (yes) referenda.

All of which may seem to be corroborated – especially if you’re partisan – by surveys showing that the more highly educated in society were more likely to vote for Europe and the Left in 2017 and 2019, and the less educated for Brexit and the ‘populist’ Right. ‘Highly educated’ generally means more rational; unless of course your education was at a ‘Public’ school. (Knowing your Latin declensions doesn’t necessarily mean you’re bright.) For the others, spending most of your leisure time watching ‘entertainment’ reality shows and funny quizzes on the television doesn’t necessarily fit you for considering serious things, or in a serious way. Hence – perhaps – Boris’s popularity; originally founded on an amusing guest appearance on Have I Got News for You, and then on a single memorable catch phrase in the last General Election: ‘Get Brexit Done’. Nothing else that he’s achieved in his political, journalistic and personal lives should merit this support; but that doesn’t matter beside the ‘entertainment value’ he carries: for now.

This must be highly depressing for the Opposition. Keir Starmer is never likely to take on a ‘clown’ persona as naturally as Boris. He’s a lawyer, after all. (The only entertaining lawyer I’ve come across is ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’, and he was a fictional one.) Labour have tried to find simple-minded slogans to rival the Tories’ advertising agents’. The best was probably ‘For the Many, Not the Few’, which undoubtedly caught on with the young; but not more generally in the face of the image drawn of Corbyn’s greyer seriousness. It’s also depressing, can I say, for ‘élitist’ academics like me, devoted to seriousness, and to its concomitants: truth, context, rationality, joined-up thought, and all those other things that are the very antitheses of ‘entertainment’ (although I do try to find places for a few jokes in my own books); and who may still be hopeful that some of these solider qualities might find their way into the national debate eventually – perhaps when our notoriously ‘unfree press’ has been liberated and cleansed.

Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons yesterday brought this home. PMQs is an almost unique feature of the British Parliamentary system, enabling ordinary MPs to quiz their chief minister on any public issue, to which he is supposed to respond intelligently and truthfully. With Boris this is never how it works out. Intelligent and indeed searching questions are put to him, by his own supporters as well as by the Opposition parties; only to be met by irrelevant waffling, cheap jibes and lies.

It was like this yesterday. It was as if Johnson thought he was on Have I Got News for You again. But we always knew he was like that. Even his supporters know it and accept it. Indeed, that was the really remarkable thing about yesterday’s performance: the way his backbenchers supported him to the hilt, ignoring the lies, laughing at his humorous put-downs (which are, it must be said, getting more and more predictable and hence less funny as the weeks go by); and raising the roof with their cacophonous shouting and whistling. (As usual; but worse than usual yesterday, it seemed, maybe because Boris had treated them all to a slap-up dinner – wine included – at the Ritz the evening before.)

Parliament is supposed to be a place of rational debate. It usually is, in its quieter moments. But what Tory backbenchers, and the people who tune into it on TV, mainly go for is the ‘provocation and sensation’ – ‘entertainment’ – it offers on occasions like this. The chairman of the BBC may be right. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that his great institution should give in to it. That way Fox News lies.

One of the effects of Brexit, and more recently of Boris Johnson’s elevation to the Premiership of the UK, appears to have been a sharp decline in the reputation of Britain abroad. Of course this is hard to prove or to quantify; but I’ve not come across anyone or any media in Sweden, for example, which has expressed admiration or envy towards Britain’s ‘liberation’ of herself from the tyranny of Brussels – let alone putting it on the same level as the Ukrainians’ brave resistance to Russia, as Boris recently gave the impression of having done; or which regards Boris as any better than a ‘clown’. The only foreign statesmen to have approved of Brexit are those who wished to take advantage of it in order to weaken Europe, and may have helped it along – I’m thinking of Russian money here – to that end. Otherwise Britain has been sorely diminished, internationally, by recent events; to the extent of inducing expressions of ‘shame’ from many Britons who formerly would have regarded themselves as pretty patriotic.

Personally I couldn’t care less about this; never having been very ‘patriotically’ inclined anyway, and knowing full well that my Swedish (and other foreign) friends don’t associate me with what is happening in Britain today. (Or in the past, for that matter; which will be obvious to anyone who has read my books, starting with my first, on British anti-imperialism.) For other Britons, however, being generally diminished and ridiculed as a nation must hurt them personally; and could even provoke dangerous reactions as a result. Even before the ‘ridicule’ phase, Brexit itself may have been partly influenced by a perceived loss of national power and prestige following (after a lengthy interval) the fall of the British Empire: illustrated perhaps by the ‘we used to rule half the world’ shouts of populist mobs recently. (‘Half the world’ is inaccurate in any case; but let’s skip that for the moment.) It may be regarded as ironic that the populists’ solution – Brexit – has probably done more to further undermine Britain’s power and prestige than even decolonisation did; but they probably don’t realise this; or perhaps don’t mind. (One is reminded of the Millwall FC supporters’ notorious chant: ‘Everyone hates us and we don’t care’.)

In any case their resentment is hardly likely to do as much damage in the world as similar defeats and disappointments seem to have done in the cases of other countries, whose subsequent aggressions could be seen – at least in part – as reactions to previous humiliations, real or perceived. Nazi Germany is the obvious example, of a nation reacting to the mortifying terms imposed on it after World War I; a lesson which luckily the Allies learned after the next War, with the result that Germany was treated very differently then, to good effect. Unfortunately the wisdom of that approach seems to have been forgotten when it was Soviet Russia’s turn to be defeated, and then continually humiliated, by the USA and the capitalist West; generating a burning resentment in the heart of Vladimir Putin in particular, culminating in his present crusade to ‘Make Russia Great Again’, bloodily.

The lesson? When you’ve won, don’t rub it in. Or, to adapt an old saying: ‘Hell hath no fury like a nation scorned.’ Especially with regard to countries where patriotism is important. Personally, I prefer the Millwall approach.

The P&O management’s monstrous decision to summarily sack 800 of its employees, in order simply – and expressly – to replace them by cheaper foreign labour, has caused huge distress here in Hull. Hull is of course – or perhaps now was – one of P&O’s main ports, for travel to Rotterdam and back (they used to sail to Zeebrugge too, but no longer), with the result that scores of my fellow Hullites have been put cruelly out of work in a matter of minutes. I’ve sailed overnight on the Pride of Hull several times, without any complaints; it’s a pleasant voyage, and gets you to the Continent refreshed and relatively carbon-free. But I doubt whether I ever will again. It’s not as if the company can’t find the labour – sailors, engineers, cabin-cleaners, stewards, etc; only that they reckon that the staff they have are too well paid. Hence their recruitment of workers who will undercut them; who will of course now have to be specially and hurriedly trained to run ships that very few of them will have been familiar with before. I wouldn’t like to sail with them in a storm.

I’m wondering whether this moral crime – a bishop has called it a ‘sin’ – was in any way enabled by Britain’s leaving the jurisdiction of the EU? I’ve not yet been able to find this out. It may well contravene British labour laws too. But even if not, the decision is certainly consistent with one of the principles espoused by the leaders and the financiers of the Brexit movement: to do away with ‘restraints on trade’ that they then blamed on the EU. ‘Neoliberals’ were in the vanguard of UKIP and of the other pro-Brexit movements. Labour legislation went against their understanding of what constituted ‘freedom’: which included the freedom of employers to hire and fire.

It’s not at all clear that those who voted for Brexit – including a majority of Hullites – fully understood this; having been seduced by the argument that Brexit would free Britons from ‘foreigners’. The foreign (Dubai) owned P&O management, and the scores of foreign ‘scabs’ being brought in to run ferries like the Pride of Hull – no longer much for Hull to be proud of – should disillusion them about this; and maybe about the beneficence of the capitalism ‘red in tooth and claw’ that we seem to be headed towards today.

My adoptive city has been through a lot over the past century: depression, German bombs, the destruction of its fishing industry, more depression, and the mockery of Southerners. It doesn’t deserve this.

I offered my UK house to a refugee family a couple of weeks ago, and should have someone coming around to vet both the house and me shortly. Obviously I had Ukrainians in mind at the time, but they can come from anywhere. I don’t suppose they’ll be aware of Hull’s reputation, so that shouldn’t put them off. (In any case it can’t be worse than Kyiv just now.) Otherwise it should be perfect for them: a largish old terrace house in a nice part of town which could sleep a family of two adults and two children easily (along with me and Kajsa when she comes), with shops, schools and public transport nearby; and a host who has actually written a book about Refugees! (In the 19th century, granted; but still…)

I’m grateful to Michael Gove for the offer of £350 a month if I’m accepted as a ‘host’, but I don’t really need it. Getting to know these people will be reward enough. I might also ask them if they could introduce me to some Ukrainian cuisine. I have no idea what that will be like.

I suspect that Priti Patel will be gone soon. But more on the grounds of her incompetence than of her cruelty and quasi-fascism. Which only go to show that however charitable you are to refugees, you can’t depend on their offspring displaying the same charity.

Well done President Emmanuel Macron for calling out Johnson’s empty boasts. ‘We’ve sanctioned more Russian oligarchs than any other nation’, Boris claims; ‘welcomed more Ukrainian refugees’; ‘led the world in supporting Ukrainian resistance’; and ‘acted faster than anyone in support of the Ukrainians’. And all, of course, because we’re out of the EU.

Well, Number One might be strictly accurate; but only because the City of London has given shelter to far more corrupt oligarchs than anywhere else, and so has more to sanction. And the government – with its governing party heavily reliant on the Russians’ financial patronage – has been very late on to this, giving the bastards valuable time to squirrel their ill-gotten assets out of the country before they can be sanctioned. But all the rest are flagrant lies: similar to the Government’s claims that it reacted to Covid 19 more quickly and effectively than those EU-strapped foreigners; or that the British press is the free-est in the world. (Actually it comes 33^rd in the latest ‘Press Freedom Index’: https://rsf.org/en/united-kingdom. But don’t tell that to the press oligarchs. And don’t expect to read it in their newspapers.)

When you look into them, in fact, none of these claims turns out to be true, and many are the very opposite. Anyone with access to the internet and his or her critical faculties about them can check them. But of course they don’t, with the oligarch-owned press being most people’s only source of information on these matters. That gives Boris free license to utter and repeat his boasts; which do seem to come naturally to him.

Does he really believe them? Or are they simply ‘mistakes’? Has he persuaded himself that they’re true? (Along, of course, with all his other notorious lies.) Is that all part of his clownish disposition? Or is he simply impervious to ‘truth’? Or – most likely perhaps, inherited from his former career as a journalist and propagandist – is he less concerned about the ‘truth’ of any of his statements, than with how they can play among his readers, in order to glean their admiration, or amusement, or – in his latest rôle as a politician – their votes?

All of them have the obvious intention of boosting not only him, which is important to a known narcissist, but also (in his mind and hopefully his followers’) the reputation of his country; which – for reasons I can understand, but don’t share – seems to be important to many people. His cheerful but baseless claims about Brexit Britain’s ‘leadership’ are meant to encourage their ‘patriotism’; in the absence today, it could be said, of anything else to make them feel proud. They might be intended to inspire respect for Britain abroad, too. But they clearly don’t. Macron attests to that.

Brexiters like to think that anti-Brexiters dismiss them as ‘stupid’. Many anti-Brexiters undoubtedly do regard them in this way. But it’s a very unwise thing to express it openly. No-one likes being called stupid. It stokes the Brexiters’ suspicion that they’re being looked down upon, or at the very least patronised – as of course they are – by ‘élitists’ who are intent on making them feel ‘small’.

This can have two effects. One is to stimulate the ‘stupid’ to recognise their stupidities, and try to educate themselves out of them. But that takes quite a bit of humility, which is rare. (It’s rare on the other side too.) The second is to turn around, like a cornered animal, and attack your persecutors and patronisers, for the snobs they appear to you to be. Then, if there’s a flag you can march behind in this cause, you get in line.

This was one of the flags that UKIP flew. Don’t mistake me: ‘Brexit’ had a number of intelligent arguments in its favour, and some ‘bright’ people on its side. (Some of them even knew ancient Greek.) But for its popular appeal it clearly leant on the prejudice of ‘anti-élitism’ a lot. Pro-Europeanism was widely associated with the ‘Establishment’ and the educated classes, which for many Brexiters was reason in itself – quite apart from any ‘real issues’ – to reject it. Foisting ‘Europe’ upon them was yet another sign of the dictatorship of the out-of-touch intelligentsia which ‘ordinary’ people had suffered under for years. The leaders of UKIP – hardly ‘ordinary’ people themselves, but purporting to represent them – seized on this in their propaganda, which was permeated with anti-intellectualism all through. A notable example was Michael Gove’s notorious ‘the people of this country have had enough of experts’, uttered when the ‘antis’ were forecasting negative results from Brexit in 2016. That almost gave license to anyone who wanted to disregard ‘intelligence’, or even ‘reason’, in pursuit of any cause at all. There was something deeply – if crudely – ‘democratic’ about it: asserting the equality of anyone’s opinion on anything, and in this case especially against those who were using expertise to ‘do the people down’. No wonder it was popular, especially among the poorly educated, who in 2017 made up the majority of the pro-Brexit vote.

Of course it does seem to indicate ‘stupidity’; which explains why anti-Brexiters (or ‘Remainers’) so harped on this: counter-productively, in my view. (I never did.) If 52% of the British population really was – and is – that stupid, I think I’d lose my residual faith in democracy, and go for ‘benevolent dictatorship’ instead. But I don’t think ‘stupidity’ is the right word for it. ‘Ignorance’ is a better one. Even the highly intelligent can be ‘ignorant’ in certain areas. (The ‘European’ issue, especially, was and is a complex one, and the sources of solid information on it hard to find.) And the very highly intelligent can manipulate this ignorance in all kinds of clever ways to almost any end they want.

That’s what happened in the case of Brexit. There can be very little doubt now that big money, right-wing press proprietors and – yes – the Russians played a large part in engineering that outcome, by seeking to manipulate understandably ignorant and put-upon people in all kinds of ways. The trouble with this analysis, however, is than it can lay one open to being labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’; which can be almost as damaging to your cause as accusing your opponents of ‘stupidity’. Clever conspirators know this too. So it’s difficult to see how to win.

A few years ago a woman I met at a party in Stockholm, having been told that I was an ‘imperial historian’, asked me: ‘why did you British want an empire?’ It seemed odd to her, as a Swede (although Sweden has also had ‘imperial’ episodes in the past); and indeed I have to admit that – even after fifty years researching into British imperialism – I had never considered the question quite in those terms. I can’t remember how I responded to her at the time; probably by mumbling something irrelevant and incoherent – what is known today (or should be) as a ‘Boris-ism’. But thinking about it afterwards, as of course I should have done beforehand, I decided to write a book in answer to her; which eventually became British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t, published by Bloomsbury – to a deafening critical silence – in 2016. (Anna’s stimulus is acknowledged in the Introduction.)

Here, more briefly, is the answer I might have given her if I’d had my wits more about me. There were of course a number of people in 18^th, 19^th and early 20-century Britain who did ‘want’ to rule over other countries and peoples. But they never represented a majority of Britons, or even of most British governments; and in general the Empire didn’t ‘happen’ because of them. Some of the Empire was acquired reluctantly (yes!), much of it accidentally, other parts criminally, and nearly all of it as a result of forces quite outside that of individual human volition. (The same was probably true of Sweden’s stormaktstiden.) So far as ‘motives’ were concerned, of course they were mixed. Some of them were what we would see as ‘bad’ ones – greed, racism, arrogance; others rather better, ostensibly at any rate: ‘civilizing’ the natives, introducing them to benefits of ‘commerce and Christianity’, pacifying them, saving them from Arab slave traders and indigenous exploitation, warfare and cruelty; but most of these latter – that is, even the ‘good’ motives – probably misguided, in the sense of being kindly intended but based on misunderstandings of the indigenous cultures Britain was interfering with, which made things even worse for her colonial subjects.

The question came back to me the other day in connection with Trump, Putin and Johnson (and Thatcher before him). They all appear to have been motivated by a concern to increase or at least to restore their countries’ ‘greatness’ (‘MAGA’), seen in terms largely of their power over others, but also of their ‘prestige’ in world affairs. That still puzzles me, as it did my Swedish friend. What is it about national ‘greatness’, seen in these terms, that makes certain people crave it? You can’t eat ‘prestige’. National security I can understand. But wanting to be bigger or more powerful or prestigious, quite beyond what their ‘security’ might require?

Richard Cobden, the great 19^th-century apostle of international capitalism, believed that what we would call ‘neoliberalism’ would do away with all this. Here’s him in 1846 (I may have quoted it before):

‘I see in the Free-trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe,—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace. I have looked even farther. I have speculated, and probably dreamt, in the dim future—ay, a thousand years hence—I have speculated on what the effect of the triumph of this principle may be. I believe that the effect will be to change the face of the world, so as to introduce a system of government entirely distinct from that which now prevails. I believe that the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; for gigantic armies and great navies—for those materials which are used for the destruction of life and the desolation of the rewards of labour—will die away; I believe that such things will cease to be necessary, or to be used, when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother man.’

If only! But of course Cobden couldn’t anticipate the direction capitalism would take after his time. And that non-material considerations would trump all these more rational ones.

*

I may come back to this. Just now I’m adjusting to my return to England: reclaiming my house and old life-style, and getting used again to the farce which is the current British government. We’re told that Gavin Williamson – one of the most useless and unprestigious of Boris’s ex-ministers (often compared to Private Pike in Dad’s Army) – is going to be made a ‘Sir’. The common understanding is that it’s in return for his silence – ‘he knows where the bodies are buried’. So much for the ‘prestige’ of being a knight.

Back in Sweden Kajsa tells me they’re taking the prospect of a Russian invasion seriously: stocking up with essentials (mainly toilet paper and wind-up radios), and locating their nearest bomb shelters. Sweden of course isn’t in NATO. Will Putin push her into it? Prestige can come at a terrible price.

In his former life, of course, Vladimir Putin was a top KGB agent. My previous research into the history of the British secret services taught me that you can never trust an ex-spook, of any country. Their work involves – it’s almost a part of their job description – amorality, deceit, conspiracy and a tendency to paranoia. Many of them – probably most – must carry all this into any employment they take up afterwards.

This could well be one of the reasons why Putin has turned out as he has; together of course with his Soviet and Russian roots. (Hasn’t Russia always been autocratic?) A spook can never change his spots. (Or only very rarely. Can anyone name an ex-spy who has become a genuine democrat?) He or she – but usually a he – has to be something of a ‘conspiracy theorist’. Putin claims that NATO and the EU have been plotting for years against Mother Russia; which may well be so (I certainly wouldn’t rule it out), but it’s the centrality of this way of thinking in his case that makes him dangerous. The KGB probably taught him that everything – life itself, and certainly relations between nations – is a ‘conspiracy’, or at the very least ‘realpolitik’, which can only be countered, therefore, by more effective and consequently amoral plots from his side. It really is like chess. Or like – I suspect – Dominic Cummings’s way of thinking about politics. And of course it fits in well with the amoralism that was such an obvious feature of Trumpism (Trump is a great admirer of Putin, by the way; as was Nigel Farage); and of Dishonest Boris’s ethic at the present day. So they’re all playing the same game; and maybe to the same rough end (hence Boris’s Russian money); albeit with different stakes.

Whether his KGB-honed skills will see Putin through this appalling war that appears to be his responsibility almost alone, none of us can tell yet. Of course the Ukrainians can’t be presented as innocent victims in every respect. Some of us remember their reputation during World War II, which gives some credence to Putin’s ‘Nazi’ gibes. And all European countries – not least Britain – are affected by far-Right extremism just now. But the invasion of a self-governing nation by a bigger neighbour has to be justified on better grounds than this. And certainly when the bigger nation is as illiberal and imperialistic as Putin’s Russia.

Of course I’m shocked and angered by current events, and deeply sorry for the poor Ukrainians. On a far more trivial and selfish level, however, I also worry about what it all means for my new book, now in the press. Obviously the text was finished before all this came up. Ukraine could affect some of my arguments: about the importance of the development of ‘late-stage’ capitalism, for example; and the agency of individuals (like Putin) in history. I think I might be able to weave these two things into my general thesis, but I’m not certain: I clearly have some thinking to do, after which they might turn out not to fit. But in any event it would have been nice to have had some time to take them on board properly, before the book comes out; which the ex-KGB man’s criminal action has deprived me of. OK, that can weigh nothing in the balance against the plight of Russia’s neighbours, and even, possibly, of the Russians themselves. They don’t all seem to be on Putin’s side. Hopefully.

And here we go. (Morning of the 24th.) Is this the consummate chess master’s deep game? It would explain Trump and Brexit too, of course.

https://eand.co/putins-game-12307a927117

During the last century Russia’s flaws and threats were invariably put down to her Communism, and consequently used as a potent argument against that political ideology. Historians however were aware that authoritarianism and imperialism had long been a feature of the Tsarist régimes that preceded the Soviet one, and consequently could be regarded as an inheritance from that era rather than as something essentially ‘socialist’. This should have warned those who had hoped, and even predicted, that the death of Communism in Russia would give way to a new age of political and social Liberalism there, that the transition might not be as smooth and simple as that.

Autocracy can wear many clothes. Putin’s sort can be traced back to the 19^th century, if not earlier; when the threat from the ‘Russian Bear’ was believed to be the major one facing Britain (and British India), manifested in countless cartoon images. (Google ‘Images – Russian Bear’.) Russophobia was widespread in Britain then – books have been written about it – and not always as misdirected as such phobias often are. ‘Just because I’m paranoid’ – about the Russians – ‘doesn’t mean I’m wrong.’