Porter’s Pensées

‘I genuinely believe that the UK is not remotely a corrupt country, nor do I believe that our institutions are corrupt.’ That was an extraordinary statement for Britain’s prime minister to make on Wednesday; not so much because it’s untrue – although it may be (see below) – but on account of the fact that he didn’t need to make it, at a press conference in Glasgow during the climate conference, when the subject was not on the agenda; and because – so far as I’m aware – no-one has ever accused Britain of being ‘corrupt’ tout court, only Johnson himself, his buddies and perhaps a number of capitalists whose wealth has always been built on ‘corruption’ of various kinds. So why did he come out with it?

Obviously it was easier for him to make this generalised claim, than to address the particular charges of corruption made against him and his government, which in the light of the last few days’ evidence would be almost impossible to dispute in such cavalier – ‘not remotely’ – terms. It shifts the argument from his own wrong-doings to the more general question of the state of the nation he leads, possibly allowing the former to fade into insignificance against the background of the latter. But if so, it was surely a dangerous ploy. If the country and its institutions are so pure, how come he and the Conservative party can be so corrupt? Shouldn’t the supposed innocence of Britain as a whole throw their own crimes into starker relief? Might it not even signify that Johnson is behaving un-Britishly?

And it also makes one think. Maybe he’s wrong – we’re after all well used to hearing lies from Boris – and Britain and its institutions are corrupt. This is too large a question to address here, in a single post; but if you look at the way Britain’s democratic institutions are manipulated by money and a blatantly unfree press (only 33^rd in the latest ‘press freedom’ index); at the Public schools; at gross tax avoidance; at Dominic Cummings; at London’s reputation as a launderer of dirty money; at the House of Lords; at Oxbridge entry; at the ways Britain’s public leaders are appointed (I’m thinking here of the heads of the BBC and Ofcom)… and at so many other examples of what should surely come under the heading of ‘corruption’ if they hadn’t become so normalised; – then one might begin to wonder whether corruption, or something like it, might not lie at the very roots of public life in Britain; rather than ‘democracy’, or ‘patriotism’, or incorruptibility, or decency, or any of her other supposed – and preferred – national and foundational characteristics.

It was that statement of Boris’s that got me speculating this way. That’s his problem. If he says one thing you immediately start thinking the opposite must be the truth.

After weeks of being confronted only by the ‘White Screen of Death’ whenever I try to post a new blog, and being ripped off by shops offering ‘Laptop Repairs’ but then f*cking the thing up even worse when I take mine in to them for help, I may at last have solved the problem; or, rather, Kajsa may have solved it for me, by suggesting that I change my browser (is that the word?) from Safari to Firefox. This is just a test posting, to see if it works. Comments to this effect will be gratefully received.

Whether I can catch up with all the extraordinary things that have been happening on the British political scene (and others) during the couple of months I’ve been away I rather doubt. But I’ll try.

I’ve finally signed the contract with Bloomsbury for ‘The Book’, if anyone’s wondering. New Title: Britain’s Contested History. Lessons for Patriots. – It wasn’t my favourite, but my excellent publisher thought that my suggestions – A Patriot’s Guide to British History, and ‘We Used to Rule Half the World, Didn’t We?’ Myth and Reality – might be misleading. (As they were intended to be.) It should be out in the summer. £20.

More in a few days.

I’m convinced that my depression – of which I’m deeply ashamed, as my generation was expected to be: ‘pull yourself together, man!’ – is mainly due to some chemical imbalance in my brain, for which I’m taking tablets. (‘Fluoxetin’. I’m not sure that they work – I still feel chronically ‘down’ – but how do I know I’ll not feel worse without them?) 

Whatever lies at the root of it, however, my worst moods are certainly triggered by politics, both at home and abroad. Currently they’re triggered – every morning when I wake up – by recalling the appalling political situation we have now in Britain: with a pretty extreme right-wing government hoisted into power by means of trickery and lies; a Labour ‘Opposition’ – the inverted commas are necessary – devoted to cleansing itself of all traces of the Social Democracy that defined Labour’s identity in its greatest and most effective years in government, including by expelling any member who dares to criticise Israel, even anti-Zionist Jews, and of course Jeremy Corbyn, who however ‘unelectable’ he might have seemed in 2019 offered easily the best solution to the Brexit ‘problem’, and was at least able to stimulate some enthusiasm  – not a terribly common ingredient in modern British politics – amongst the young, who are going to inherit this world we oldies are fucking up for them; and, lastly – amongst these ‘triggers’ of my depression – an electoral system that makes it difficult to see how any of this can be mended, at least before the next General Election, due in May 2024, and maybe not even then. 

I explore some of the deeper causes of this situation in the final chapters of my Patriot’s Guide to British History (about which, incidentally, I still haven’t heard from my publisher). One of these causes is undoubtedly the cleverness of those who conspired to bring about Brexit, for reasons of their own – mainly to ‘complete the Thatcher revolution’, as a few of them openly admitted – with quite remarkable success: playing on the grievances of ordinary people, with the help of rich backers and a highly partisan popular press, untruths on the sides of buses (or was it only the one?), and in the knowledge of the devious ways in which Britain’s ‘democracy’ could be manipulated both to achieve their immediate ends, and – probably – to sustain those ends in perpetuity. I don’t want to make too much of this, for fear of being labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’; just as I’m unwilling to place too much emphasis on the part played by the British Board of Deputies in the smearing of Corbyn, which certainly had some effect in 2019. But there can be little doubt that the deeply flawed nature of Britain’s electoral system – not just ‘FPTP’ but also the character of her public discourse – made it a good pitch for ‘conspirators’ to bowl on; shattering the wickets of what used to be known as the ‘Gentlemen’. (As against the ‘Players’, or professionals. For Americans, that’s a reference to cricket.) 

Isn’t this enough to make one depressed? Even without the chemistry?

Of course I can’t be sure; but I suspect Hilary Mantel may be right to think that Boris Johnson ‘knows’ he shouldn’t be Prime Minister: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/sep/04/hilary-mantel-i-am-ashamed-to-live-in-nation-that-elected-this-government. If that is so, what a terrible burden to him this thought must be! Having striven all his life to be ‘world king’, encouraged by his schooling and his Tory supporters to think it would be ‘easy-peasy’, and wouldn’t, for example, require any serious thinking on his part, or take up much of his time, he now finds himself floundering in the middle of at least three god-awful national crises, only one of which (Brexit) was any of his doing originally, with a bunch of hopeless ministers to help him out, and with nothing but his teddy-bear image and a few rhetorical flourishes – most of them beginning to look a bit tawdry now – to sustain him. Even his loyal populist newspapers, it seems, are beginning to lose faith. It must be awful to be him just now: knowing deep down that he’s simply not up to it. I almost feel sorry for the bastard.

Which all bears out my long-held view that wanting to be Prime Minister (or maybe any other ‘top’ job) should automatically disqualify one from getting it. If it’s just the status you desire, rather than wanting to do something for society, you shouldn’t be allowed within a hundred miles of Downing Street. Politics isn’t a ‘game’ you learn at your Public school and from Cicero; or just a ‘career’. It’s far more serious and important than that.

Of course Johnson was – and is – simply the tool of other, far cleverer people, and of the late-stage capitalist beast that probably underlies everything that’s going on just now. If Johnson ever gets to realise that, it must make him feel even worse. I don’t envy him his dotage, thinking back on his failures. But maybe young Carrie will find ways to cheer him up.

I was never an ABBA fan at the time. I was persuaded they were too kitsch. (And I was getting into Bruckner then.) But I’ve grown to like them since; partly for their Swedishness: their unisex dressing, for example; and their ordinary decency, by comparison with most other pop artists, except perhaps for that boring old virgin (one imagines) Cliff. And ABBA’s songs are original, and far superior musically. I like their slow introductions, leading into memorable main tunes – ‘Waterloo…’ (A bit like Schubert.) – They used to write their songs, incidentally, in a sommarhus on an island very near to ours. I can hear the skärgård in them. 

What a thrill it was this morning, then, to learn that they were coming back, after 40 years of silence, with a concert in London next May. So they must be in their 70s now? Here are the two tasters they pre-released yesterday (if it works). I think they’re terrific. But that’s probably the kitsch in me. At bottom I must be a sentimental old fart.

Brexit is a disaster, corruption is rife, the Government is incompetent, plague stalks the land, and people are being blown to bits trying to escape from Kabul. So Michael Gove decides to make a fool of himself. (Having apparently refused to pay the £5 entrance fee: ‘Don’t you know I’m the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster?’)

Good grief. That it should come to this…

So even our intrepid 1950s space pilot knew it (see my last Post but one)! This is from the Eagle, 17 December 1960. It’s in a story called ‘Mission of the Earthmen’, which is redolent of the British liberal-imperial values of the time. Someone ought to write a research paper on it. I would, if I had time.

I’ve finished my ‘popular’ book – for about the sixth time: I always think of something to add – and am waiting for my publisher to get back to me. Unfortunately she’s on holiday – how dare publishers take holidays! They should be on call to their authors every minute of every day!! – so I’m left in limbo for a week or two, suffering from the post-natal – or should it be post-coital? – depression that always afflicts me at this stage. Is the book as good as I thought it was when I was in the throes of creation? Or is it a load of crap? In particular, have I allowed my feelings about Brexit to undermine my scholarly objectivity? Or can I persuade readers that those feelings genuinely arise from the objective history I’ve tried to record in the book? And will this affect the publisher’s judgment of whether the completed work should be accepted into her stable? (Bloomsbury are mainly an ‘academic’ publisher; but they were pretty complimentary about the ‘proposal’.) I won’t know until Emily gets back from her – I’m sure fully deserved – holiday; refreshed and happy enough, I hope, to smile on my curious Patriot’s History.

What I need to do now is to free myself from the obsession with the book that has taken me over during the last six or eight months, and focus on something else. We’ve just acquired a new puppy (Irish Soft-Coated Wheaten Terrier – our third of that breed) who is doing a good job of distracting me, mainly by licking my face and biting my toes. (She seems to be a foot-fetishist.) I wanted to call her Bobby, after the great Bobby Moore, but Kajsa wasn’t having any of that (I can see her point: the puppy is a bitch); so she’s now named Tjorven, after a character in a Swedish children’s book. 

Apart from Tjorven, I’m trying to get back to reading novels, which I haven’t done for months, or even years. There’s a pile of them by my bedside. The one I’m into now is Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Under Ground; for which he couldn’t find a publisher while he was alive, but which has just been issued by the Library of America Press. I discovered Richard Wright many years ago, and read and hugely admired all his books. The Man Who Lived Under Ground  is up there with the best of them; but – you should be warned – it’s not a cheerful read. I’m reminded of Dostoyevsky, and perhaps Kafka. Not the best cure for a post-natal (or coital) depression, perhaps, but I’m determined to finish it. And then perhaps Emily will cheer me up.

As a lesson in the futility of even ‘liberal’ imperialism – if you can credit the USA with that motive, at least in part – the present situation of Afghanistan could hardly be bettered. The Americans’ (and British) mistake was to allow a mission initially designed to root out terrorists who were threatening other nations, including their own, to morph into a ‘nation-building’ one, with the object of converting the country to ‘liberal democracy’ in its Western form. That was unwise. (As of course was America’s role in backing the Taliban against Soviet-inspired Afghan communism before that.)

Nation-building of this kind, incidentally, was what the British only rarely tried to do in their empire. This was partly because the Brits – sometimes for racist reasons: the ‘natives’ weren’t up to it; partly because of their weakness on the ground: I don’t know if many people appreciate how tiny the British colonial establishment was, and so fearful of rubbing up its subjects the wrong way; but also because many of them were genuinely respectful of the cultures they were supposed to be lording it over, and harboured doubts about their own – usually chose not to interfere in those cultures; indeed, often incurring the resentment of Western-educated indigènes for that reason. In the particular case of Afghanistan, which the British army invaded on several occasions in the nineteenth century, always being beaten back, Britain also – eventually – learned from experience; an experience the US might also have profited from, if she had known any British imperial history. 

Democracy – or liberalism, or ‘freedom’, or whatever – can only very rarely (Japan may be an exception) be imposed on a country from the outside. It has to come from within. I’ve been searching for a quotation I’ve used before from a nineteenth-century imperialist, no less, who said just that, and can’t find it for the moment (stuck out here away from my books!); but no matter: in any case Kajsa tells me that Marx made the same point. That was the huge and tragic mistake that the more culturally confident American Neo-Cons (remember them?) made in Bush’s and Blair’s time; an appalling error from which so many countries – but especially Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – suffered so grievously in the age of late American imperialism, ‘liberal’ or otherwise. 

It may be a general law of empire, in fact, that bad results can often come from the best of motives. You don’t have to believe that imperialists were only after gold or oil or cheap labour or any other form of lucre (although of course many were) in order to be critical of their achievements. Many of the most unfortunate effects of colonial rule were well-meant. (There may be instances the other way round, too: transportation?) That’s important to know, because it frees us from having to make difficult moral judgments about the people and nations who indulged in imperialism. We can make judgments about their judgment, perhaps, which is at the root of my criticism of Tony Blair over the Gulf War; but that’s another thing. Blair and Bush were appallingly wrong; but that doesn’t make them necessarily evil. Foolishness can be as fatal as wickedness, and ignorance – of past history, for example – can make it worse. 

The ‘Public’ schools – Britain’s ‘peculiar institution’ – were not always the blights on her society they are today. Early on, of course, they were meant for ordinary people (boys, that is), which is why they’re still called ‘public’ now. By the early 19^th  century they had become finishing schools for the privileged, but effectively run by the boys, which explains Tom Brown’s Schooldays; and also the school riots that broke out occasionally, some of them having to be put down by the military. At least these could be taken as evidence of independent thought on the part of the boys. Then, ‘reformed’ in the middle of the 19^th century, the schools entered into their golden age of service to the nation, supplying it with prime ministers and bishops to keep it running in a ‘civilised’ way. For the Empire, expanding and needing people to rule it, they were its major source of ‘prefects’, as one historian of Indian administration has called them. 

This wasn’t all bad, because the values inculcated in these young stripling rulers were generally moral ones, as ‘morality’ for the upper classes was understood then: in terms, that is, of helping those less fortunate – or ‘civilised’ – than themselves. Sometimes this involved protecting the colonial indigènes from voracious capitalist exploiters, or at least trying to; thereby rubbing down some of the sharper edges of imperialism. For the Public schools’ dominating ethos then was, basically, not a capitalist but a ‘feudal’ one, best expressed in the term  ‘noblesse oblige’; which was of course why Margaret Thatcher despised these men so much: the ‘wets’, as she called them, mostly with Public school backgrounds, who were such a barrier – temporarily, at least – to her dream of a totally ‘dry’ – materialist – economy and society. 

But this particular Public school ethos in any case seems not to have outlived the decline and fall of the British Empire, which took away much of this particular raison d’être  of the schools, and hence of the values that had underpinned them. At the time it was widely assumed that it would also make the schools themselves less prominent in at least the higher reaches of British politics and society; with much being made of the much lowlier origins and schooling of a succession of prime ministers from Harold Wilson – replacing the Old Etonian Harold Macmillan – onwards; and including of course Thatcher herself. (But not Blair.) This was supposed to indicate Britain’s final emergence into the light of the modern day; when – reflecting what British society had by now become – her leaders would be chosen from the sorts of schools the majority of her people had attended.

Until, that is, 2010; when another Old Etonian entered No.10 Downing Street, so reasserting Eton’s grip on British politics; to the surprise of many of us, who had assumed that such establishments had gone the way of the rest of English feudalism, together with jousting and burning witches, never to return. David Cameron’s and then (especially) Boris Johnson’s whole demeanour and attitudes reflected their Etonian upbringing, almost embarrassingly for some of us – Boris’s ‘jokes’ in particular; but not the old sense of morality, or obligation (‘oblige’), and the better values that had been associated with the Public schools in their Imperial days. Those had gone. All that remained were the sense of entitlement that was probably the least valuable legacy of the old Public school system, and the immature school-boyish behaviour that went along with that. In place of the duties and ‘obligations’ that the schools had once engendered there were just self-aggrandisement, corruption and foolishness; which one assumes had been drafted in to replace the older values under and after Thatcher, to enable Eton – and the other Public schools – to survive in a more mercenary age. You needed a lot of – probably ill-gotten – money to be able to send your sons there. It wouldn’t do for the schools then to teach those sons to despise the system that had enabled that. And so we have Boris, and Jacob, and Nigel, and the rest of them, lording it over us.

If any of my Old Etonian acquaintances are reading this, by the way, I don’t mean you. Or George Orwell, of course. (Although he would probably have agreed with me.)