Porter’s Pensées

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.’

There are three ways I can think of to repair Britain’s crippled democracy. One is a fairer electoral system than our present ‘FPTP’ one. (Here’s one way of doing it while still retaining local accountability: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/.) The second way is the introduction of a truly ‘free’ press: i.e. one that is not only ‘free’ in a commercial sense, or ‘free’ to anyone who can buy it up.

The third way is the introduction of proper political education in schools. That would involve teaching pupils about the fundamentals of the British constitution, such as it is; how to recognise ‘propaganda’, especially of the ‘fake’ sort; fact-checking against sources; questioning; and – most important of all – how to think rationally, in a joined-up way, and with a regard for the contexts of ideas and events, of which the ‘historical’ context could be one. I understand that some schools have been trying to do much if not most of this. My heart goes out to them, in these dangerously divisive times. (They may, incidentally, find my forthcoming book helpful.)

One of those schools appears to be the one in Nottingham whose pupils, as part of their Politics course, recently wrote a letter to the Education Secretary highly critical of the impact of government policies on them; and also, more generally, of Boris Johnson’s ‘hypocrisy’ (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10494787/Nadhim-Zahawi-slams-Nottingham-school-told-pupils-criticise-Boris-Johnson-Partygate.html.) That of course angered Conservatives no end, and seemed to confirm their age-old prejudice against any kind of ‘political education’ in the hands of teachers, whom they have long suspected to be, as a genus, ‘left-wing’.

This goes way back. I remember that in my schooldays – I’m talking of the 1950s here – we weren’t allowed to be taught any History post-1914 (or even earlier), on the grounds that it could so easily be twisted by evil Marxist pedagogues into political indoctrination. ‘Working-class’ history was discouraged too. The equivalent issues today, similarly mistrusted by the Right, appear to be ‘Black’, Women’s, Colonial and ‘Queer’ histories: all of them threatening to poison the public discourse with what is termed ‘wokery’. (Whose excesses, incidentally, also often anger me.)

Today’s Tories dislike these disciplines and approaches mainly because of the threats they pose to their own dominant world view. It was the ‘Left-wing’ slant of those Nottingham school-kids’ letter that they objected to. If Politics is to be taught in schools, say the critics, it should be ‘balanced’: on the one hand Johnson the liar and hypocrite; on the other hand brave Sir Boris, killing the dragon ‘Covid’. Both sides should be presented equally. (Rather as they are supposed to be on the BBC. ‘On the other side of the argument we have the Flat Earther, Mr…’)

I don’t suppose it has occurred to these Tory critics that, if teachers do tend to be Left-wing, it could be because they are more highly educated – even ‘brighter’ – than other people; and consequently more likely – often, if not always – to be right? – Of course this is an ‘élitist’ view, and so dangerous to voice publicly. But élitists have a right to be heard too.

What a gift for Boris this Ukraine business is! It gives him the ideal opportunity to look strong and resolute, climb into fighter jets for photo ops, talk with (or, rather, at) powerful autocrats, issue dire warnings, look Churchillian, speechify and sloganize, harness history to his purposes (‘Munich’), send in soldiers… and push all that trivial ‘partygate’ stuff aside. (‘I’m focussed on the real issues’.) And all without doing anything at all to help the situation; indeed, if anything rather the reverse, if it makes it more difficult for Putin to behave as reasonably as he’s insisting he’s already doing. If he (Putin) draws back his troops, Johnson will claim it as a victory for his Churchillian stand. If he invades regardless, it will still be said to have justified that stand. For Boris it’s a win-win situation. Not, of course, for the Ukrainians; for whom one suspects it can only be lose-lose.

Of course I have no reliable opinion on what is in Putin’s mind, let alone BJ’s; and no more knowledge of things on the ground than I read in the generally ignorant, and deeply partisan, British press. (Sweden’s is more reliable.) Putin’s case against the Ukraine’s shifting towards NATO and the EU looks fairly reasonable (or let’s say ‘rational’), in geo-strategic terms. But then I have no way of knowing how likely that scenario is. There’s a case to be made for Europe’s having ‘imperial’ ambitions that threaten Russia’s border-states. That’s what our British Brexiters claimed, after all, with respect to the EU’s ‘imperialist’ relations with the UK. This seems to lie at the root of Putin’s paranoia; if indeed that is what it is. On the other side, a case can be made for Russia’s wanting to revive the Russian Empire/USSR, especially in the Baltic States, which are – as it happens – very close to us. That may be why Kajsa tells me she’s recently spotted Swedish warships in the Stockholm Archipelago. The Russian-speaking population in the east of Ukraine also obviously poses a problem, just as the Germans in the Sudetenland did in 1938. That needs to be sorted, one way or another; but in any case diplomatically.

I have to say I find it difficult to get inside the minds of those who think in these rather simplistic geo-political terms, despite my having studied ‘great power rivalries’ and ‘empires’ all these years. (There are gradations of ‘sovereignty’, and of ‘subjection’.) Nonetheless they seem genuine on the part of many national leaders, especially the more authoritarian ones. Whether they will cause Putin to launch a ‘Sudetenland’ on the Ukraine, and then advance to confront the Swedish navy in the Baltic, I can’t possibly tell. But then neither can Boris, nor Biden, nor all those others who are predicting – or at least uttering dire warnings of – ‘the biggest war since 1945’ (that’s Johnson yesterday), in order to make our toes curl.

Let’s hope toe-curling is the end of it. And – more trivially – that the Ukraine doesn’t give the same boost to Johnson that the Falklands gave to Thatcher. He doesn’t deserve it.

What is it with me and Brahms? I first came to him via those French Nouvelle Vague films of the 1950s and early ’60s, nearly all of which had Brahms playing in the background. One, I seem to remember, was even called Aimez vous Brahms. Well, I did aime him; or thought I did; especially the first string sextet, which seemed to give expression to my adolescent feelings at the time. (I was going out with a French girl. Ah, Martine!!) I dutifully went through all his other stuff: symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music, songs, the Deutsches Requiem. I’ve remained faithful to that sextet, the first piano concerto (the gutsy one), the Requiem, and the Alto Rhapsody. But all the rest now leave me deeply unsatisfied. Is it because the ones I’ve listed are – I think – relatively early works, written while he still had some spunk?

Yesterday we attended a performance of his violin concerto in the Stockholm Konserthus – I believe the first ‘offline’ concert they’ve had there since lockdown. The hall – an architectural gem, by the way – was packed. It was great to be rubbing shoulders again – literally; the seats are quite narrow – with other people. But the concerto still disappointed. It was well played, by a Danish violinist, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, and Kungliga Filharmonikerna under the baton of the excellent Alan Gilbert. But I feel that, like most of Brahms’s music, it doesn’t say anything.

Am I missing something? Probably; I ‘missed’ the ‘something’ in Wagner, for example, for many years before I succumbed. Myself, I’m a Berlioz man when it comes to mid- and late-19^th century romantic composers. Just now I’m soaking myself in Bruckner. (I’d like to die to one of his adagios.) Maybe that’s why I currently find Brahms so facile. I’m reminded of a judgement I read once, in a novel I’ve forgotten the name of. ‘Brahms wasn’t a great composer. He just sounds like one.’ Clever. (I wish I could remember who wrote it.) Do other classical music lovers feel the same about him?

If I get Covid through being in a crowded concert hall listening to his music, I’ll know whom to blame.

I’ve just turned 81. That’s well past my sell-by date, I reckon, and indeed a bit of a bonus in view of the various afflictions that have hit me over the years: nothing really serious, but two or three of which would have almost certainly killed me in the days before modern medicine. (But isn’t that true of most of us?) Obviously, in the immortal words of Frank Sinatra (My Way), ‘the end is nigh’ for me now. I’m not afraid of it – it must be quite restful to have melted into nothingness – but only of the process, in case it turns out to be painful and friendless. Or is that too personal, and too heavy for this blog? I’m sorry if so. I won’t dwell on it.

But in any case it’s not my own situation that is getting me down nowadays, or even my ‘regrets’, of which I’ve had more than ‘a few’ (Sinatra again); but the situation of the world, and of the country of my birth in particular. It’s not only Boris and his cast of monsters (see my last blog) who get me down; but the whole tenor of British – and several other countries’ – politics at the present time. You’ll know what I mean: lies, corruption, foreign interference, one-rule-for-them, the necessity for food banks, propaganda, cynicism, greed, imperialism (still), ‘dead cats’, privilege, ‘populism’, ‘partygate’, ‘wokeism’ (distracting people from greater problems), fake ‘anti-semitism’, a corrupt press, war-scares, ‘celebrity’, Prince Andrew, anti-vaxxers, climate-change denial, and – in my admittedly biased view – the late-stage capitalist crisis that may lie at the root of most of these things. (I could go on. But it’s already getting boring. Indeed, isn’t that one of the dangers: that the government’s problems and misdeeds, endlessly recounted, get so boring as to make people want to push them away?) That said, however, I’ve never known such a depressing period, politically, in all my (too) long lifetime; and in particular cannot remember a time when there seemed to be so little hope, of anything better coming from it, on any front.

Of course little of this affects me personally, born as I was into a uniquely lucky generation (in Britain). But it may weigh heavily on my children and grandchildren and their generations; who won’t be able even to conceive that a welfare state like Labour and the Liberals gave us in the 1940s, free health treatment and university education, growing equality, together with a pretty flourishing industrial base, and a pretty civilised and honourable political discourse, are even possible. (And that’s without taking the international situation on board.)

Above all – way above all – they won’t be able to feel the hope that most people, even the most oppressed of us then (women, gays, blacks), cherished in the post-war years, right up to Thatcher: the ‘Whiggish’ faith, that is, that however bad things might be right now, they will get better. Who can possibly think that today? Corbyn seemed to be promising it in 2019, and politically re-energised millions of younger Britons as a result. But his defeat also marked the destruction of ‘hope’. Now the only hope being promised – apart from Boris’s and Jacob’s wet dreams of a post-Brexit free market heaven – is of mending some of the damage the Tories have done over the past thirteen years. Nothing more.

You may think I’m romanticising the post-war years in Britain. Maybe. Here’s a piece I wrote about the 1950s for the TLS a few years ago. (I may have posted it before.) That, too, emphasised the ‘hope’ that I see as the main casualty of modern times: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/swinging-fifties/. But I’m sounding like a nostalgic old fart now. Or the depressive I certainly am.

PS. Here’s another version of my ‘1950s’ piece, from this blog: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/28/1956/.

If you saw these pics on a poster outside a cinema, you’d know what sort of movie you were in for, wouldn’t you?

PS (for those who may not have recognised them, like the Facebook editor who declined the post because, I think, he assumed the boy pic was a reference to paedophilia):

The Count Dracula figure on the top left is in fact Jacob Rees-Mogg, our new Minister for pointing out the benefits of Brexit (if he can find any); the Rosa Kleb-like figure by his side is (or was) his old nanny, whom he used to take out canvassing with him (is that a coffin behind her?); and the boy at the bottom is Boris Johnson as a child: in whose dead, alien, Midwich-cuckoo eyes I think we can already see the self-regarding and entitled amoralism he has become notorious for as an adult. A Pantheon of horror-movie characters; as British readers of course won’t have needed to be told. This PS is just for you furriners.

The depth of the present British government’s descent into lies, treachery, corruption, ignorance, clownishness, rank amorality and total discredit is difficult for us innocent children of the sunny (if only in black-and-white) post-war years to fully grasp. In the 1950s and ’60s this kind of record would certainly have spelled any government’s swift and ignominious end.

But of course most people alive today don’t know about the 1950s and ’60s, or only have a distorted view of them planted in their minds by Tory propagandists: rationing, strikes, three-day weeks, power cuts, fogs, fish and chips wrapped in poisonous newsprint, Derek Hatton, bodies unburied, Cantabrigian traitors, their black-and-white tellies – and the very occasional high profile political scandal which did force ministers to resign. All true, of course, but by no means the whole picture. And it wipes out all memory of the generally honourable conduct of British politics then, certainly on the domestic front (not so much in the Empire and Ireland), and of our politicians, even Conservative ones – a number of whom I actually got to meet in my younger days. You couldn’t say of these, with any degree of credibility: ‘oh, they’re all the same’, ‘all out for themselves’, ‘each as corrupt as the next one’, and ‘always have been’; which are the kinds of excuses being trotted out these days for the state of politics under Boris and his gang.

And it’s these excuses, of course, that are destroying present-day British politics, and possibly the country, even more surely than the corruption itself. What’s the point of ousting the monster when there’s no-one better to take his place – certainly not in the governing party – and not even on the Opposition benches, once the Right-wing press has dug its teeth into them. ‘They’re all the same’. So why get too upset about the present bunch of bastards? And why bother voting? ‘Politics has always been like this.’ It can’t change. Sit back in front of the telly and watch Nadine Dorries – our Minister for Culture, no less! – eating an emu-anus on ‘I’m a Celebrity’. That’s all politics is good for these days, and probably ever was.

Except, that is, for the Right; who have hooked on to the brilliant idea that disparaging democracy is a good way of manipulating it for their own ends. In this they’ve been hugely helped by all kinds of flaws in the British electoral system, poor political education, high-level conspiracy (even Russian), and the sorts of ‘freedom’ the press is allowed to have. ‘Take the voters for fools, and they’ll give you what you want.’ It’s tempting for Leftists to infer from this that most people – those who voted for Brexit, for example – are stupid. That thought, of course, is even more dangerous for democracy.

But how on earth do we counter it, without huge – even revolutionary – changes to our education, our media, and the way we choose our MPs? Since the flame of hope that Jeremy Corbyn briefly lit in this poor naïf’s soul (mine) flickered and died, I’ve been unable to see a way. Illegitimi non carborundum, they say; but the bastards seem to be doing a pretty good job of that now. I’m not the only one being ground down. But just remember: it wasn’t always thus. Times were bad in other ways, perhaps; but not with this degree of sheer political corruption’s being accepted as normal. We used to be better than this. Can’t we be again?