Porter’s Pensées

For me the most depressing thing last year – I realise I probably should have been more moved by people dying from Covid 19, or by the wars and massacres going on all over, but I’m afraid they didn’t upset me so much – was the vicious press campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, who is almost the only decent politician we have left in England, and the one who has been right about almost everything; and in particular the charge against him, and the Labour Party, of anti-Semitism. 

That was a difficult charge for Labour to combat when it originally came up in 2016, first because it was untrue; and secondly because it was the very last thing that Labour Party members would have suspected of themselves, in view of the Party’s strong and consistent line on anti-racism throughout its history, its strong Jewish membership, and the way its whole philosophy had been informed by Judaeo-Christian ideals. Honestly, the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ took us (I was in the party then) all completely by surprise, which is why we didn’t take as much notice of it as we probably should have done. It was as if a tree were accused of uprooting itself and running around (I’m sorry, I’m living in a very sylvan environment just now, and can’t think of a better metaphor): i.e. simply inconceivable. Here’s my own initial reaction to it: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/28/anti-semitism-and-labour/; which was followed up by others along the same lines. I suspect that this may have been why ‘anti-Semitism’ was chosen by Corbyn’s enemies – as a charge so utterly ridiculous that we wouldn’t have prepared any defences against it.

Things got more difficult as the Right-wing press seized on it, knowing full well how noxious an accusation like this that would seem to readers brought up on images of Hitler’s death camps; almost equivalent to the charges of paedophilia that were also going around at that time. (I’m mildly surprised that the press didn’t accuse Corbyn of that too.) The effect of this on the hierarchy of the Labour party was two-fold: to panic like frightened rabbits into agreeing to ‘investigations’ into the supposed ‘problem’: it must be a problem, mustn’t it if the Daily Mail and Dame Margaret Hodge were saying it was; but secondly, for those on the Right of that hierarchy (aka ‘moderates’), to use it themselves to drive the dangerously socialist Corbyn out. The investigations duly took place, one of them under the auspices of the European Human Rights Commission (EHRC), and found virtually no evidence of anti-Semitism in the party: just a few marginal and ambiguous utterances or ‘tropes’, much less in fact than you would find in any other large part of the population; to which the Press’s reaction was to abandon this ground and instead to highlight a suggestion in one of the reports to the effect that Corbyn had not done enough to stamp anti-Semitism out. Actually he had been very active in this respect; but even if not who could blame him, in view of the fact that there wasn’t any serious anti-Semitism anyway?

The result of all this was that the mud remained sticking to him. I realised this when the driver of the taxi I engaged to drive me to Stansted Airport last July (to avoid the plague) told me that he had been going to vote Labour in the previous election, until he read about ‘all that anti-Semitic stuff’. This is only one example, I grant you, but I can’t believe he was alone. Indeed, this gargantuan smear may have been one (only) of the reasons why Labour lost that election, and so why we have landed up, as a nation, where we are today.

Since then we have learned much more about how the smear was orchestrated and pushed not only by the Right-wing press, but also by agencies of the Israeli state. I realise that might make me seem like a ‘conspiracy theorist’, but here’s just one bit of evidence:  https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/we-slaughtered-jeremy-corbyn-says-israel-lobbyist.  So far as Israel was concerned, of course, Corbyn’s sin was his support for a Palestinian state; and his criticism of the colonial expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and of the over-reactions of the Israeli Defence Force to Palestinian protests and rocket attacks. (We’re seeing more of this just now.) His hostility to the present Israeli government, therefore, was either motivated by ‘anti-semitism’, or was a sign of anti-semitism in itself. So believes (or pretends) Netanyahu, who makes no distinction between the two.

As neither, apparently, did the Jewish Board of Deputies in Britain; at whose insistence the Labour Party was persuaded to adopt a ‘working definition’ of ‘anti-semitism’ tabled by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which appeared to link anti-semitism with criticism of the state of Israel, but in truth didn’t really. (It only suggested that ‘anti-Zionism’ might be a mask for anti-Semitism. For a much sounder definition google this year’s Jerusalem Declaration.) When Keir Starmer became Leader of the Labour Party he not only embraced the IHRA statement as party policy, but also forbad constituency parties from even discussing it – or, for that matter, his expulsion of the pro-Palestinian former Leader from the party. (This was when student unions were being threatened with huge fines for ‘no-platforming’ speakers.) The party also incidentally wrote to me to warn me that my reluctance to believe that it harboured widespread anti-Semitism was anti-Semitic in itself. It was in protest against this that I resigned from the party last year. (I don’t imagine they noticed at Party HQ.)

The reason that this has come up with me again today is that yesterday evening I tuned into a ‘webinar’ launch under the auspices of the Haldane Society of a book on all this, called How the EHRC Got it so Wrong: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3922-how-the-ehrc-got-it-so-wrong (digital only). The speakers included – as well as prominent Jews (many Jews supported Corbyn) – Michael Mansfield QC, the human rights lawyer; Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC; Liz Fekete, Director of the Institute of Race Relations; Daniel Finn, Features editor of Jacobin magazine; and Peter Oborne, whose Assault on Truth: the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism – about Boris – I’d just read. It was I think the best Zoom session I’ve attended; but deeply depressing. Hence the opening words of this post.

Here are a couple of the things arising out of all this whole unsavoury affair that most depress me. The first is the apparent power of all these lies to mislead millions, through tabloid press headlines, TV presenters and reporters nervous of offending various ‘lobbies’, and the other forms of propaganda that are blighting our whole public discourse today. I’ve met intelligent people who still take the lies seriously, on dubious grounds like ‘there’s no smoke without fire’, ‘all politicians are the same’, ‘the truth must lie somewhere in between’, ‘how can we take him seriously when he dresses like Worzel Gummidge’, ‘that’s just a conspiracy theory’, ‘she’s a member of the élite’, and so on: none of them taking account of the arguments (if there are any) themselves. And of course very few people are really interested in politics, which in any case are in bad odour generally today (‘they’re all the same’); so perhaps we shouldn’t expect any better. But it seems to spell the victory of evil over good; of advertising over truth; of lies over honesty; of Goebbels over Corbyn. It’s enough to make one – me, anyway – weep; not just for poor Corbyn, but for our national future generally.

The second depressing thing for me is the possible effect of this anti-anti-Semitic campaign on my own attitude towards Jews. (Not the Jews – they’re not a monolithic body; a fact that the British Board of Deputies seemed ignorant of.) One of the slights that Jews have always had to suffer is of their ‘race’ as brainy but evil conspirators: against Christ originally, then in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and in dozens of political events since then. ‘Pro’-Semitic gentiles have always objected to that as a slander. Yet here we have Jews – some of them – clearly launching a ‘conspiracy’ against Corbyn; which can only confirm that prejudice. Isn’t this dangerous for Jews and Jewish communities all over? Mossad may be playing with fire. It’s obviously not going to make Jews as a category or as individuals better respected by any British socialists who may as a result be inclined to generalise about Jewry, in the same way that some Jews have taken to generalising about them. I’m not affected in this way. But the Labour Party may be. If it’s not anti-Semitic currently, this whole deplorable affair, and the suggestion that it could have lost them a crucial general election, could make it so. 

Wasn’t this a sight for sore liberal eyes yesterday? Priti Patel’s evil regime being resisted by honest Glaswegians intent on rescuing their immigrant ‘neighbours’ from incarceration and/or deportation: just as they had used to in olden days? (See my The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics.)

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/may/13/glasgow-residents-surround-and-block-immigration-van-from-leaving-street.

Is this just Scotland? Or just Glasgow, perhaps. I know there’s not the same feeling there against immigration that there is in parts of England. They need more people. And, really, shouldn’t they be allowed to decide their own migration policies themselves? Another argument for Scottish independence, perhaps, freeing them finally from the tyranny of our proto-fascist government in England, and enabling them to become friends with Europe again.

Of course if that happens they might be inundated by a less welcome wave of immigration – of Sassenachs fleeing to escape the same tyranny. We’ll see whether they extend the same hospitality to us. I know at least one person who’s made the move already. I’ll have to ask him.

I’ve written about our appalling Home Office, with reference to its attitude towards and treatment of immigrants, before: https://bernardjporter.com/2018/05/31/our-unhomely-office/. Here’s a well-researched, insightful and deeply shocking piece about it in today’s Guardian. A long read, but worth the effort. – And we call ourselves a ‘liberal’ country?

The title of this post is taken from the public reaction to the ‘Sidney Street Siege’ in 1911. I’ve written about that too, but I can’t remember where.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/13/cruel-paranoid-failing-priti-patel-inside-the-home-office

I read somewhere that Robert Schumann, recovering from madness, suddenly found he could write music again, and so got down to his piano, completing a couple of new pieces. His wife and admirers were chuffed at the thought of the old Schumann back, and eagerly looked through the new scores; only to find that they weren’t new at all, but pieces he’d written and published years before, and then forgotten about. Sad. 

I’ve just had a similar experience. Today I received – at last – a copy of my Britain Before Brexit, and leafed through it, as proud new authors do; only to find that I’ve already said there much of what I’m writing now, in my new book, A Patriot’s Guide to British History. I’d forgotten, too. Probably my age. Anyway, it means I may not need to continue with A Patriot’s Guide. I’ll ask my publisher what she thinks.

I can’t remember going mad in the meantime. I’ve never voted Conservative, for example. But friends will tell me.

The town that hanged a monkey thinking it was a French spy! So not surprising, perhaps, that it voted Conservative yesterday. At least they can’t blame it on Corbyn, I thought, but I see that some commentators are. Why can’t Starmer re-mobilise some of the enthusiasm among the young that Corbyn so strikingly stimulated? Couldn’t he have kept that, and combined it with his more forensic approach? Why is Corbyn still banished, on a lie? Well, I’ve left the Labour Party now, so it doesn’t feel such a personal loss. And I now have Vänsterpartiet and proportional representation here in Sweden.

Two films to recommend: Paterson – wonderful – and the TV series Succession (or is it Successor?), which we’re streaming, and hating, but can’t draw our eyes away from. I take it it’s a true picture of Murdoch’s and Trump’s corporate hells. All very depressing.

I’ve gone back to working on my next book, A Patriot’s History, but with lots of doubts about it. One problem I have is my deteriorating memory, which means I forget in chapter 9 what I wrote the week before in chapter 8. – And I still haven’t received a copy of my last book, Britain Before Brexit, posted from the UK more than a month ago, but delayed, I presume, by the aforesaid Brexit.

Anyhow, I hope you like the new cover of my Lion’s Share: A History of British Imperialism. It comes with a finger puppet. I thought I should try to widen the market.

We need to accept this: that the Right are cleverer than we are. By the ‘Right’, I don’t mean those who voted for Brexit and Johnson necessarily, but those who so successfully manipulated them. And I’m not sure that they really are so ‘clever’, rather than simply unprincipled. You can get an awful long way in this world by following the advice (or were they warnings?) of Niccolo Machiavelli, and reaching Faustian compacts with the Devil. (Or with Dominic Cummings, as he’s known today.) 

Anyone could see – especially after ‘social media’ revealed the true depravity of people’s thinking – that the British electorate wasn’t deeply interested in politics, except as a game. And that it could be easily seduced by superficialities, propaganda, lies, and pandering to its prejudices; at a time of general discontent; with the Press on your side; and with the help of a few clever tricks to divert all this into channels that suited the manipulators. It didn’t need Cummings’s great brain to work this out; only a willingness to put all morality aside in the interests of ‘winning’. Rightists, it seems, can do this. For moral Leftists – which I like to think describes most of us – it somehow goes against the grain. Is that why we’re destined always to lose?

This is supposed to be a picture of Boris’s and Carrie’s controversial £50,000 refurbishment of the Prime Minister’s flat. It may not be – apparently it’s simply from their chosen decorator’s catalogue. But if it were, what a wonderful illustration of the Brexiteers’ old imperial wet dreams!

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.