Porter’s Pensées

I don’t usually blame schools for their products. If I did I’d have to berate my own alma mater for producing David Irving, the Holocaust denier; although he was there a few years before me, and so couldn’t have been taught by the History masters who inspired me. (In fact I don’t think he did History there at all.) 

So it may not be entirely fair to blame Eton College for Boris. Eton of course also ‘produced’ George Orwell; and a handful of leading figures in British history, not all of whom were as awful as BoJo. (See https://www.thefamouspeople.com/eton-college.php.) I’ve personally known several ‘Old Etonians’, and two future headmasters, the second one of whom was a nice guy (a ‘colonial’). So let’s not generalise.

But…. What is it about this school that in modern times has gifted us not only Johnson, and I presume his father, but also David Cameron, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Alexander Nix, the CEO of the now disgraced Cambridge Analytica whose Machiavellian ‘algorithms’ were (partly) responsible for getting Britain out of the EU? What unites all these characters above all is a certain public amorality that they must have picked up from somewhere; and with all of them having spent their formative years at Eton, obviously the finger of suspicion must first point there. 

It really is astonishing that in this day and age Britain should still be recruiting its leaders from the ‘Kynge’s College of Our Ladye of Eton besyde Windesore’ (founded 1440), whose main distinguishing feature is the whacking great fees they charge the parents of its students to go there: over £40,000 a year when I last looked, which is more than I ever earned in a year. Apart from anything else, this must greatly diminish the pool of potential talent from which they select their pupils. 

And it’s not as if Eton educates these boys (is it still only boys?) to a higher level of intelligence and ‘leadership’ that will compensate for this. Judging by those we see in public life today very few of them seem to be of better than low-to-middling brainpower. Some – Rees-Mogg, to give the most glaring example, judging from his recent book The Victorians: ‘this clichéd, lazy history that often reads like it was written by a baboon’: that was the Telegraph’s (no less) review of it! – are simply stupid. All they have is a little Latin and Ancient Greek to impress the impressionable with their ‘superior’ upbringing. That doesn’t denote intelligence; only memory. None of these people has any grasp of rational thinking, or of History after the fall of the Roman Empire, and still less of ‘life’ as it is experienced by normal men and (especially) women today. In former times the Public schools were better than this. They were supposed to instil what was called ‘character’ in their pupils: virtù, to use an old Roman word for it; honesty; truthfulness; ‘fair play’: the attributes (apparently) of the ‘Old English Gentleman’. Johnson and Co., however, show no sign of any of these qualities. 

What has happened to the Public schools since that great (query) heroic age? I think I know. They’ve been subsumed by capitalism (those huge fees) and its ethic. The British upper classes always were good at adapting themselves and their institutions to the temper of the times. All Eton turns out now are callow young men who play at life like a game, unseriously, encouraged to think that they are entitled to this by the cloistered courts they are surrounded by (actually I don’t know whether Eton has literal ‘cloisters’, but it works as a metaphor), self-obsessed and self-admiring, their juvenile language – those ‘piled-up bodies’ – and jokes learned at their school debating societies and never modified by adulthood.

Eton gives them, not a proper education, but – in the cases mentioned here – an automatic entry into the Conservative Party; which then releases them into wider society, to do their worst. Surely the School deserves some of the blame for this? (And we, of course, for putting up with it.)

Looking back, I see this isn’t my first rant against the Public schools. Here’s an earlier one, with some personal context: https://bernardjporter.com/2019/01/13/the-fcking-public-schools/. There are others. Sorry to be boring. But bloody hell: what a menace they are!

As a card-carrying Leftie, I’m a little unnerved by the times I get irritated by opinions of other card-carrying Lefties that irritate card-carrying Rightists too. One example is the ‘statue’ thing of a few months ago, which I blogged about at the time: https://bernardjporter.com/2020/06/12/imperial-statues/. I’m sorry, comrades, but it isn’t important! And wouldn’t it be better to leave the statues there, properly labelled, to remind passers-by of our national crimes (the point I was making in that post)? And to avoid riling reasonable people to no good purpose? 

The same applies to some (not all) of the ‘politically incorrect’ landmines we are supposed to avoid these days. A few years ago, after a lecture I gave in Melbourne, a woman in the audience went at me for referring to nations as ‘she’. The talk was about the persecution of refugees, for pity’s sake. (I wondered how she got on in ‘la France’.) I’ve been similarly attacked for calling an 18-year old waitress a ‘girl’. (Maybe ‘waitress’ is wrong too, in the same way as ‘actress’.) I do now avoid referring to ‘cripples’, ‘blindness’, ‘American Indians’, ‘men’ when I mean both genders, ‘blacks’ until I know what they currently want to be called, the ‘English’ when I mean ‘Brits’ and vice-versa; and a whole lot more. But I still don’t think it should matter, as much as it seems to in certain ‘progressive’ circles. Once in South Africa I asked a ‘Cape Coloured’ friend what they called themselves now, after the end of Apartheid. ‘We call ourselves “the people who used to be known as Cape Coloureds”’ was his reply; an admirably relaxed one, I thought. And it should have enabled ‘the people who used to be known as Cape Coloureds’ to concentrate on the important problems they have in their country, rather than taking offence at mere nomenclature. The same applies to British Leftists. We have a pandemic to deal with, an incompetent and corrupt government, the Brexit mess, and Priti’s incipient Fascism. And you choose to focus on what the transgendered amongst you are called?!

It’s for this reason that I also take the side of the Rightists on the question of ‘No Platforming’ in British universities: speakers being banned on the grounds, for example, that they have ‘incorrect’ ideas about gender – even if the topics of their talks are something else entirely. Of course there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed: a speaker explicitly inciting an audience to violence against gay people, for example, which existing legislation should cover in any case. Otherwise the ordinary standards of ‘free speech and discussion’ should always apply. I would even allow Holocaust deniers a platform; though I’d understand if that were felt to be a line too far for – for example – Jews. The only critical argument I would make against the no-no-platformers is that they are probably exaggerating the ‘problem’, for their own propagandist reasons. But that just shows the harm that these protests can do. Why give the Right the oxygen they need, allowing them to take the libertarian high ground, for no really important  purpose? And should we no-platform speakers who want to no-platform others?

The other grouse I have against the ‘Left’ concerns its use of the word ‘imperialist’ as if it equates with ‘Nazi’, and damns anyone even mildly associated with the British empire in the past to contumely as on a level with Hitler or (at best) Adolf Eichmann. That offends me professionally. I reckon I’ve always been as anti-imperialist as the next man (or woman); and I grew up as ‘our’ empire was being – thankfully – dismantled. But I’ve also studied  it, enough to realise the complexities behind its accumulation and its governance, and to know that the ‘exterminate all the brutes’ version of it – the title of a book by the Swedish writer Sven Lindquist, the phrase taken from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – not only does scant justice to some ‘imperialists’, whom I’m not particularly concerned about, but also enormously oversimplifies the whole picture of European ‘imperialism’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; which is annoying to me. The misunderstandings implied here are too deep and too numerous for me to delve into and try to untangle in a blog post: especially when you can get hold of my recent British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t (IB Tauris, 2015: a snip at £20) to find out. But some of these comrades really do cheese me off. And – again – they distract us from the battles that need to be fought just now.

If it was Demonic Cummings who invented that last election slogan, ‘Get Brexit Done’, for his former buddy Boris, it was a brilliant wheeze. There seems to have been a simple calculation behind it. Most people aren’t worried about policies these days, and even less about ‘character’ (apart from in the ‘Ooh! Isn’t he a character!’ sense). They want a prime minister who will ‘get things done’; especially things like Brexit, which had been boring the pants off them for years. They’re fed up with politicians, who they’ve been told are ‘all the same’, and only out for themselves; told, that is, by a Right-wing press whose main agenda is to undermine respect for politics in general, so that it can pursue its own mercenary agendas without interference. That’s why they rubbished Jeremy Corbyn so thoroughly: a man who was so transparently honest that he would be bound to undermine their general case. And it’s why they don’t seem to mind, and the public doesn’t seem to care, that Boris Johnson is the most lazy, clueless and deceitful prime minister Britain has ever had – ‘mad and totally unethical’ according to Cummings himself yesterday (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/23/dominic-cummings-launches-attack-on-boris-johnson); and some of his ministers (and one ex-prime minister) the most corrupt in at least recent British history. With the result, of course, that when Johnson did ‘get Brexit done’, and in short order, it turned out to be the disaster in so many ways that is now being revealed almost every day of every week.

The promise to ‘get things done’ is a common rhetorical device for politicians with an authoritarian streak. It was a big part of Mussolini’s appeal; and of the British Union of Fascists’, who called their party newspaper Action with reference to it. I imagine that it was also one of the things that propelled Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and explained the popular support for him despite his huge character failings, which – as with Johnson – his voters overlooked (originally) in return for his ‘getting things done’: especially that ‘wall’. And it is why both of them, Trump and Johnson, were so prepared to override or to exploit constitutional niceties in order to get things done: Trump by his use of Executive Orders, Boris by manipulating constitutional procedures – and threatening to amend them, later, in the interests of ‘efficiency’. Apparently that was one of Cummings’s wheezes, too. 

Boris can I think be characterised as a proto-Fascist, albeit a cuddly English one. But he and his acolytes in the Cabinet also seem to be taking on the character of something more mediaeval: of robber barons, who feel that their position and status entitle them to a degree of patronage which is entirely personal, and can be doled out without proper scrutiny to party supporters and chums; even blokes they meet in pubs. Is this getting through to people? And do they care? I suspect the answers to those questions are ‘yes’, and ‘no’, in that order. Which is what is depressing about present-day British politics.

And that’s without mentioning Israel’s oh-so-damaging influence: Priti Patel’s undeclared links; Keir Starmer leaving a Moslem meeting because he was told there was a ‘boycotter’ there: and so on. But then of course we’re not allowed to mention these, for fear of being tarred as ‘anti-semitic’. – In connexion with which have you seen the ‘Jerusalem Declaration’ on anti-semitism – https://jerusalemdeclaration.org? It’s a response to the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-semitism which underlay the attacks on Labour in 2019. As a pro-Jewish pro-Palestinan – but even more, a pro-rational argument fellow – it made my spirit soar. I’m nervous of fellow Leftists becoming anti-semitic because of the baseless attacks of the ‘Israel lobby’ on them. Keir Starmer: please read, learn, and inwardly digest.

Leaving off ‘the book’ for a while. I’ve written most of it in draft, and at amazing speed, but am unhappy with it. That’s partly because I thought I could finish it by recycling a chapter from my about-to-be-published Britain Before Brexit (BBB; chapter 14, if anyone’s interested), but it doesn’t seem to work. These short cuts never do. Final chapters have to grow organically out of what has gone before. In a bit of a Bruckner phase just now, I was put in mind of the attempts to complete his unfinished 9^th symphony (actually 10^th or 11^th if you count symphonies nos. 0 and 00) by tacking his Te Deum on to the end. That didn’t work either. I’ll put the book aside for now, and return to it when my thoughts are more settled.

I still haven’t seen a copy of BBB, sent to me from the UK nearly a month ago, but delayed either by Covid or Brexit or Postnord – there’s no way of knowing which. It’s frustrating, not being able to hold my new baby in my arms.

Still, more time for blogging. Which will resume shortly, I hope. I’d like to write about present-day young ‘anti-imperialists’, who don’t know a bloody thing about it; the Right-wing coup in the UK; liars in government; and depression. (If I can get out of the one I’m in now.)

We’ve just had our first ‘jabs’. We had to wait for them longer than we would have done in the UK, but English friends are congratulating us for having been given the Pfizer vaccine, rather than the Astra-Zeneca. I understand that doubts are being raised over the latter. And that as a result the tabloids in Britain have stopped calling it the ‘Oxford vaccine’: is that right? In fact the development of all these vaccines is tribute to internationalism, which the Right-wing press clearly don’t like. There was a Swedish input into Astra-Zeneca, but you don’t get people here calling it the ‘Swedish vaccine’. Nationalism really is a revolting thing when it tries to ride on the back of saving lives.

I know nothing about the relative merits of these vaccines, simply because it’s complicated and I don’t have the knowledge. It’s not because: ‘oh, you can’t ever believe anything these people say’, which seems to be a common response these days to just about anything that politicians, especially, tell us. It’s a lazy attitude, releasing us from the necessity of inquiring and checking. I can understand why it’s so widespread, in view of the number of times we have been fooled by Establishment figures in past history; and in view of the blatant lies and even crimes of Britain’s present set of leaders. ‘Dodgy Dave’ is the latest; how unjust that Dennis Skinner was removed from Parliament by the Speaker for calling him that just a few years ago! Boris is far worse, of course, and Rees-Mogg not much better. 

I wonder where these three learned their immorality? Perhaps at their schools….? – Wait a minute: isn’t that something they all have in common? Perhaps we should find out what that school was, and get it closed down? 

Otherwise, writing is going fast – 25,000 words so far – but I’m doing that thing I always do, in common, probably, with most writers: waking up in the night convinced that it’s all crap. My problem is that sometimes it is crap. I’ll take a break from it now, to recover from what everyone tells me will be my body’s reaction to the jab. (Or is that just Astra-Zeneca?)

Immersed in my new book now (10,000 words under my belt!), so little time to blog. Hence the radio silence recently. There’s so much nonsense (in Britain) to write about, but I can’t see how I can add to what others are saying. We’re still on our island, having endured a whole winter here, which is rather heroic; but deliveries from Systembolaget have kept us going. (Two boxes of wine a week and a bottle of gin every fortnight – is that excessive?) We hope to go over to the UK in July – I need to check references – but that depends of course on the plague and travel restrictions. No jabs for us yet – we blame Boris for stealing all the EU’s Astra-Zenicas; but we’re hoping to get those next week. I’ll be back blogging sometime. In the meantime, here’s a rather good piece about the stereotypical picture of us ‘Ex-Pats’ I picked up on the net recently.

Started work on my new book. Title: A Patriot’s History of Britain. The idea of that is to lure and mislead Rightists into buying or borrowing it, after which they’ll either realise it’s not for them, and throw it away angrily; or stay with it to become enlightened. But it’s not just intended to deceive. One of the book’s underlying messages will be that ‘patriotism’ can be selective, and yet still give one the warm, proud feeling that a more uncritical kind apparently does. And it will carry the lesson that the highest form of patriotism is the one that makes you want to make your country better; and that to do that you need a realistic grasp of how it is presently, and was in the past.

It will be my answer to all this ‘flag’ rubbish. The book will be brief (200+ pages), and hopefully popular. (I can carry my learning lightly when I try.)  I’ve sent a proposal to Bloomsbury, who served me pretty well with my last book. Let’s see what comes of it. 

I thought this might make a good Introductory quote:

One thing that the pandemic has taught us is the inadequacy of the ‘free market’ when it comes to crises. The fact that it’s the most Neoliberal nations in the world which currently have the highest per capita death tolls from Covid-19 may be evidence of this. In the UK, the grotesque failures of the government’s preferred policy of commissioning private companies – usually Conservative Party donors or personal chums of ministers – to supply PPE and other medical necessities to tackle the crisis, at the loss of millions of pounds to the Exchequer (i.e. to us), are by now notorious. Crises like this surely require socialism (of one kind or another) to get us through them.

Which makes nonsense of the extraordinary claim made by Boris Johnson yesterday (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-56504546), that the successful roll-out of the vaccine in Britain is proof – not only of the advantages of Brexit, which we would expect him to say – but also of the superiority of capitalism, no less; and more than that, of ‘greed’ (his word), so echoing the sentiment of the villainous Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVxYOQS6ggk): ‘Greed is Good!’ To me that sounds both stupid, and a possible clue to the path he’s leading us along.

Some trivia!

We’re very lucky here, able to self-isolate together on this beautiful island; and unlikely to catch the virus, therefore, unless it can be spread – like a lot of diseases here – by the deers and badgers who are almost our only neighbours. We’ve got each other; and the telly, of course, and lots of ‘streamed’ programmes to watch – a terrible period drama on Netflix, sub-Jane Austen with added rumpy-pumpy; The Crown, which was OK; and The Detectorists, which we liked a lot – plus wi-fi and Zoom for our work and for Kajsa’s teaching. But we’ve been out in the sticks here for six months now, and are beginning to get just a little stir-crazy. Spring promised to come twice, but then disappointed, with more snow. And for me the last straw was running out of proper English marmalade. The stuff they make here is far too sweet.

Then, however, came salvation. First of all the local shop started stocking ‘Hasses Pomeransmarmelad’, which turns out to be made from Seville Oranges, and just like the marmalade I used to make dozens of jars of back in the day. Kajsa’s bought me six jars (50 kronor each). Apparently Hasse lives on the island. – And then we suddenly learned of a chap who makes crumpets, which I haven’t had for years. He’s an Englishman who used to be Chief Pastrycook at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, no less. He’s going to post me some.

Good to see some resistance to Lady Macbeth’s Police Bill, though I’m not sure whether the violence in Bristol will hinder or help it. I wondered about agents provocateurs. I wouldn’t put it past this government to engineer a Reichstag Fire.

Like many writers, I presume, my head and my filing cabinet are filled with opening chapters, paragraphs or just lines of books I thought of writing at one time, but never got round to. These began with an erotic novel I started on at the age of about 17, inspired I remember by Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes, but abandoned after I’d got the girl’s dress off, because Keats had given me no precise guidance as to what was supposed to follow. (Remember that 17-year olds were still virgins then.) After that I remember aborted works on the histories of anti-communism and anti-intellectualism; a full-length history of British travellers and residents in 19^th-century Europe (in the end I managed to get a couple of articles out of this); a detective story set in the 1890s based on the pleasant fiction that Karl Marx hadn’t really died but was playing cricket for Gloucestershire (don’t ask); a biography of a Victorian indigo-farmer, cod philosopher and writer on Indian architecture called James Fergusson; a history of Sweden for Brits; a book on an early 19^th-century Radical I discovered who had written Elementary school textbooks on dozens of subjects under the nom de plume of a fictional clergyman; a history of West Ham United football club; several autobiographies, left aside because I thought I was too boring; and probably some more projects I’ve thankfully forgotten.

The following is the start of a book proposal that I only thought of this morning. The title is intended to mislead Rightists into buying it. It’s for a short radical history of Britain, provoked by current events and a particular Tweet – mentioned at the beginning – that irritated me. Whether irritation is the best mood to write a serious work of history in is rather doubtful; as is my strength to undertake another substantial writing project at the age of 80. So this will probably go into the filing cabinet with all the other abortions. But in the meantime…

A Patriot’s History of Britain

‘Patriotism’ in Britain is usually associated with the political Right, and with allegiance to the Monarchy and the Flag. Recently a Conservative MP by the name of Lia Nici, representing the fishing port of Grimsby, tweeted that ‘if people are not proud to be British, or of our flag or Queen, they don’t have to live in the UK. Perhaps they should move to another country they prefer.’ My response to that, which will give an early clue as to the point of view to be taken in this book, is that I have indeed ‘moved to another country’ – Sweden, as it happens – but that I still desperately miss the old tolerant Britain we used to have before Brexit turned it into something I can no longer feel loyal towards. I think that could be said to make me at any rate a sort of ‘patriot’, if you don’t assume that Queen- and flag-loyalty are necessary for that. My allegiance is to another sort of Britain; not the entire essence of that country – I’m not claiming that this is the only way ‘Britishness’ can be conceived – but one of a collection of essences that together make up that complex multi-national entity.

Patriotism wasn’t always a conservative or reactionary thing. When Dr Johnson in 1775 famously called it ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’, it was at a time when the term was more often used by democrats than by Tories, to describe their solidarity with peoples rather than with governments; and by the American revolutionaries of that day in particular. For much of the nineteenth century in Britain it was still seen as a radical or what today we would call a left-wing sentiment, probably until Disraeli appropriated it for his Conservative Party in the 1870s. It was then that ‘imperialism’ became associated with it too. Thereafter ‘patriotism’ never lost its right-wing connotations; which were, however, often disputed by radicals keen to emphasise the ‘British’ or ‘English’ historical origins of the anti-establishment causes they espoused. Usually those were placed in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ times, supposedly the fount of all Englishmen’s ‘liberties’, before they were taken from them by the Norman invaders (or imperialists) who still formed the basis of the British aristocracy. In the nineteenth century that was still being called ‘the Norman Yoke’. Anti-aristocracy, therefore, and by extension anti-monarchism, was – as in America – a ‘patriotic’ cause. It was the same in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Lia Nici’s association of patriotism with royalism then would have seemed perverse.

Britain’s history in modern times (I’ll be beginning around 1800) can be regarded as a competition, or conflict, between these two kinds of ‘patriotism’. Sometimes they cohered together, as in the twentieth century’s two World Wars where ordinary soldiers’ loyalties towards their ‘mates’ fighting alongside them turned out to be perfectly compatible with their upper-class officers’ loyalties to King, country and Empire, so that the two kinds of patriotism could work effectively (or fairly effectively) in tandem: until they uncoupled, very obviously, once the wars were over. At other times they stood against each other, with Lia Nici’s ‘higher’ loyalties jarring with those of ordinary folk who were not persuaded that the Queen and the Union Jack represented their interests too. Of course there were many who were so persuaded, just as there were a few at the ‘higher’ level whose patriotism was more democratic; which will complicate the narrative that will be spelled out below. But the tension was always there, running through the whole of Britain’s history over the past two hundred years and more.

Although I’ve chosen it as my main theme, I don’t want to claim that it was necessarily the dominant one in this period. Nor were what one might call the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Norman’ perceptions of patriotism the only ones on offer at any time. ‘Patriotic’ appeals were often used and manipulated by other forces in British society, on both ‘sides’, to cover other intentions and interests, especially material ones; and to obscure a more potent dynamic that may have lain – and I shall argue did indeed lie – behind everything. But I thought it might be useful, or at least enlightening, if I gave a new account of Britain’s modern political and social history which emphasises the democratic-patriotic side of it as much as the other, and highlighting the radical and liberal aspects. One example – just as a taster – is the strong anti-imperialist thread that is – I would say – one of Britain’s main intellectual and political traditions; which might possibly surprise the many people, and not only the unlettered, who dismiss modern Britain as ‘imperialist’ tout court. Others are republicanism; various forms of socialism; pacifism and internationalism; feminism; and maybe – I won’t know until I’ve written the book – a dozen others.

Some of these trends are the ones that explain my affection for the land of my birth, and my loyalty to it insofar as that goes; which is as far as it conforms, at least in part, to the particular – though not exclusively – ‘British’ ideals that I so admire in its history. You could call it a conditional patriotism. Today (this is being written in March 2021) Britain appears to have strayed too far from those ideals to deserve my allegiance, let alone my ‘pride’ – which in any case is a nonsense with regard to a nationality one was born into; but I live in hopes that it may return. This explains my desire to bring those ideals, if not to the forefront of this account – that would be a falsification – at least to their proper places in Britain’s contested history.

[Added the next day.] Of course this is not at all an original approach. There are already several Histories of Britain focussing on the working classes, for example; and it could be said that the main tradition of British history writing since Hume, JR Greene and Trevelyan has been a ‘liberal’ one: concentrating on ‘progress’ and ‘improvement’, and glossing over the darker aspects – emphasising slavery abolition, for instance, rather than slavery itself. When I wrote the above I hadn’t given it enough thought – the penalty, perhaps, of writing whilst irritated. I’ll cogitate more, and either abandon the whole project – most likely – or get back to you.

And I stand by what I’ve written about the history of ‘patriotism’. Apart from ‘mine is the only religion’, ‘my country right or wrong’ is perhaps the most dangerous idea in the world today.