Porter’s Pensées

For an American history and politics wonk like me, and in addition a sucker for American courtroom dramas, the current impeachment trial of Donald J Trump is the gift that goes on giving. Today’s spat between the two leading counsels over whether witnesses should be called was the icing on the cake. I’m still watching on my computer (the PBS channel) and enjoying it greatly; more so, probably, than my American friends, who will be taking it more seriously. We still don’t know whether the trial will be wrapped up today, or be extended into the following days or weeks while witnesses are cross-examined. I’ll be happy to hang on.

Incidentally, doesn’t the interior décor of the Senate chamber look rather Napoleonic? Revolutionary associations, I presume. Plus, its British architect was of French origin.

OK, it’s only a trivial complaint, and not my main one against Brexit; but I still haven’t received several orders and even Christmas presents from the UK, apart from one where I was made to pay more in import duty than the thing had cost. I’m not alone in this; the various ‘Brits in Sweden’ Facebook sites are full of similar stories. The other thing we have in common is that none of us is entirely sure who or what is responsible for this. We’d like to blame Brexit, of course; but – as several have pointed out – Postnord, the local official postal company, is notoriously inefficient; and there is a pandemic raging, which is affecting flights, etc. from abroad. 

Regarding Postnord: I can’t quite work out whether it’s a state or a private enterprise. It operates in Denmark and Germany as well as in Sweden, with the Swedish and Danish governments both holding stakes in it. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostNord.) Does that count as ‘nationalised’?

Anyhow, my experience of our post over the last two months, including Christmas and New Year (and my birthday!), has determined me never to order anything from UK outlets again. Luckily I can get most British books from local shops here in Sweden, or even from a friend’s bookshop in Germany (and if I’m desperate an amazon.se has just started up); and the ‘Little Britain Shop’ in Gamla Stan sells English essentials like Marmite and Bovril. The latter are terribly pricey compared to in Britain; but I imagine that Little Britain has to pay hefty import taxes too.

I doubt that the loss of my – and my fellow exiles’ – British trade will make a great dent in the British economy. And I don’t expect any sympathy from stay-at-home Brexiters: ‘You lost, get over it’. (And ‘why do you want to live abroad in any case?’) On the other hand, the same problem may exist for the stay-at-homers, albeit in reverse, with shortages and hefty price-rises on their Bries and  Ardennes Patés. What is your ordinary working-class British Brexiter going to say to that? (Irony.)

PS. (Later the same day). Good explanation here from Garry Jones, editor (is that the word?) of one of my ‘Brits in Sweden’ sites: https://lifeinsverige.se/postbrexit/?fbclid=IwAR3e98ECoXtKQJSznVrv9DMA_TVRUUxBZc_y6AOGPJmaRvyN4oskQ4ImnmU.

Jeremy Corbyn is perhaps the most honest politician Britain has had in decades, who has been right on nearly every important issue over the past thirty years, and who in the last General Election stood for policies that – as is beginning to be acknowledged now – would have enormously benefitted the country in this present health crisis; and in addition would have solved our ‘Brexit’ problem with none of the disastrous effects that Boris’s ‘fix’ has brought. 

OK, I understand why Corbyn was rejected by the electorate, and why Labour would probably have done better with a leader who wasn’t so vulnerable to the monstering of the Right-wing press. In fact I suggested at the time of his election as leader that, bearing in mind all these disadvantages, he should be kept on in that position long enough for him to radicalise the party, but then be encouraged to pass the baton over to someone with more perceived ‘charisma’: see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/07/06/2710/. It’s a great pity, incidentally, and a reflection of the depths to which British politics has fallen, that ‘charisma’ is seen to be so essential today. (Attlee had none, and he was arguably the best peacetime prime minister Britain has ever had. Johnson, who has charisma in spades, could well turn out to be the worst.) But there we are. 

In the last Labour leadership election I voted for Starmer, impressed with his forensic skills, and with the fact that he had stuck with Corbyn in the shadow cabinet, but also in the hope that he would represent the more acceptable face of Corbynism – a.k.a. ‘democratic socialism’ – to the people. It now seems that that was as bad a call on my part as was my earlier support for Corbyn; but of course for totally different reasons.

Starmer first alienated me by his (or his party secretary’s) ban on all discussion of certain important issues in Labour party constituency meetings, especially Palestine, which as a pro-Jewish pro-Palestinian I felt strongly about – the ban, that is, rather than the issue itself. It was on these grounds that I severed my own 50-year links with the party late last year. Then there was Starmer’s expulsion of Corbyn from the Parliamentary Party, on entirely spurious grounds. Recently there’s been his wrapping himself in the Union Jack, almost literally, at a time when ‘nationalism’ is one of the major threats facing the peace of the world, and in a way that is bound to make internationalists uneasy. (There is a case for a ‘radical patriotism’, but this isn’t it.) And now comes this. 

I was only made aware of it this morning. Can it be true? Readers of this blog will know that I’ve been defending the cad Assange for years. If Ken Loach is right, then I feel his revelation fully justifies my resignation from the Party; in common, as I understand it, with thousands of other (and much younger) ‘Corbynites’. 

Where do we go, I wonder, from here?

‘An electorate of fools manipulated by a small group of clever bastards.’ This is how I’m tempted to see ‘democracy’ in Britain and the United States just now. Is that fair?

If so, the solutions seem to be straightforward. Don’t ditch democracy. But (1) educate the democracy politically. This is difficult to do in a way people will respect, I grant: ‘political education’ has a dodgy reputation; but simple lessons in rational thinking and checking sources (see  https://bernardjporter.com/2018/03/01/kallkritik/) might be a start. (2) Take a leaf out of the clever-clog Right’s book, and learn how to ‘game’ the political system in the same way, albeit to other ends, and more ethically.

This article from Time magazine shows how it can be done; and apparently was done, in the last US Presidential election, to counter the Right’s clever tricks and get Joe elected: https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/. (Thanks, RR.) We need something like that in Britain, if it’s not too late; a Dominic Cummings of our – that is the Left’s – own. 

(PS. That’s as well as electoral and press reforms, of course.)

No blogging recently because busy with proof-reading (the stale essays collection). Also a big birthday yesterday; normally the occasion for a huge party, but reduced this year to Zoom. I’ll resume – re-zoom? – in a few days, when the proof-reading and indexing are done. In the meantime: here’s our winter hideaway.

I’ve never been one for generalising about nations and their ‘characters’, and indeed my many travels – and actually living and working in three countries I wasn’t born in – have confirmed to me the range of ‘identities’ that exists in any country. For example, my Absent-Minded Imperialists demonstrated, I hope, that Britain was never the ‘imperialist’ society she was often taken to be in the 19th and 20^th centuries, and then afterwards by ‘post-colonial’ literary theorists; with other national ‘discourses’ existing side-by-side with those associated with the empire, and often cancelling the latter out. (‘Anti-imperialism’, for example, has an equal claim to be a British characteristic, and indeed a British invention.) In much the same way I’ve never accepted the common ‘Okker’ view of Australians, or the gun-toting view of Americans, or the Swedes’ idealised view of themselves – I’ll leave the French and Germans aside for now, for fear of upsetting them – on the grounds, not so much that they’re wrong, but that they describe only partial and often misleading aspects of these countries. Usually the characteristics that are emphasized are chosen simply because they seem exotic to the observing party, depending on their (the observers’) perceptions of themselves at the time. (There’s a chapter on this, Victorian Britons’ attitudes to Continental Europeans, in my forthcoming Britain Before Brexit.) They’re also influenced by the visibility of certain characteristics. Britain’s being surrounded by water has always been an obvious one, leading to the assumption that Britons must be insular. But there are others too.

Living in Sweden I’ve come to appreciate some of these. Old prejudices remain here, of course, based on all that historical baggage that Britain drags around behind her as an ex-empire, and on the Swedes’ insistence on referring to the country as ‘Storbritannien’, carrying as it does the mistaken inference that the ‘stor’ bit indicates ‘great’ in the sense of ‘terrific’, which of course it never did. (It just meant Britain as distinct from England. When the Victorians wanted to include the empire, they used the word ‘Greater’.) But in addition to this, foreigners’ impressions of Britain today are mainly based on the words, actions and even appearances of her leading statesmen and women; which – as even the latters’ supporters might ruefully acknowledge – are not likely to add to their country’s dignity. Boris Johnson is ridiculed almost as much here as he is in Britain, with Rees-Mogg, Farage and Gove not far behind. They also play to another foreign perception, not entirely unwarranted, that Britain is still basically feudal and dominated by stunted public schoolboys. By contrast with Sweden’s and the EU’s far more statespersonlike political leaders, these men are presented – or, rather, present themselves – as characters out of Monty Python  or Fawlty Towers, which of course the Swedes, and I imagine most other Europeans, are intimately familiar with; together with those other ‘typically British’ cultural productions, Midsomer Murders  and Death in Paradise – also currently all over Swedish TV. Cricket is another source of amusement on the Continent, although of course it’s not intended as such. (I get quite offended by this.) This may be important. We may not agree with Macron, Merkel and Lövgren (the Swedish PM), but we don’t see them as laughing-stocks. Britain’s own leaders are. And it’s they who just now are the public face  of Britain, to her huge detriment when it comes to her ‘position in the world’.

I have to say that, even as an internationalist, I feel very depressed at this situation. I’m far from being a British (or English) ‘patriot’; but I’ve always admired certain features and trends in British society, which are never unmixed and unsullied, and are rarely peculiar  to Britain, but seem admirable to me. Many of them were advertised in Danny Boyle’s wonderful opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics: the one that was objected to as too ‘multicultural’ and even ‘socialist’ by Tory MPs. One of these features is – or rather was – Britain’s tolerant attitude towards foreign refugees the past. (That’s in Britain Before Brexit, too.) Others were her political liberalism, her cosmopolitanism, the social welfareism embraced both by her socialists and her more traditional Tories in the last century, the strong anti-imperial strain in her politics referred to already, and of course cricket. To all this we might add her open acknowledgement of the mistakes that she – or her leaders – had made in the past, represented by those statues of slave traders and such, which should still be allowed to stand, in my opinion, albeit helpfully labelled, to remind citizens that their history has not always been an unsullied one.

But none of this, of course, is shared by Britain’s present-day leaders and so-called ‘patriots’. And it’s their sort of ‘patriotism’ that is giving Britain such a bad name abroad; that, together with stories of EU citizens now living in England (not so much in Scotland) being ill-treated by ‘patriots’ of this ilk. I feel deeply ashamed at this: not personally, but by association. And it’s this that sometimes makes me want to surrender my British citizenship, and fall back on my Swedish one alone. (But did you know that I’d have to pay £372 to do that: https://www.gov.uk/renounce-british-nationality? £372 to give back something! Jesus wept!)

But then I recall my conviction that you can’t characterise nations by their leaders alone, even if they were educated at Eton; or by their newspapers; or by their nativist mobs. There’s still some good left in the old country, hidden away. And in any case, I’d miss the cricket. So I’m staying a ‘dual’.

Cover of my new – and almost certainly last – book, due out on 3 June. It’s a collection of old historical articles and lectures, representing the non-imperial side of my work; together with a couple of new ones on present day concerns, which may well have passed into history themselves by the time it’s published. (They include Boris, so let’s hope so.) It’s not going to be a best-seller; history books, and especially collections of essays, very rarely are, unless they’re by politicians, TV personalities, or historians who have courted notoriety, especially with Right-wing views. It will probably be expensive, with the publisher relying on libraries and the e-market for sales. (I’ll get almost nothing, of course.) And the sub-title may be a little misleading – it’s not directly about the relationship between Britain and Europe, about which I’ve written before (Britain, Europe and the World. Delusions of Grandeur: 1987) – but it was the best we could come up with. 

I think Bloomsbury’s cover is quite striking. And holding the book in my arms – I always think producing a book is rather like giving birth to a baby: labour, pain, post-natal depression, although of course I only have empathetic experience of those – will be a nice gift for a new octogenarian. (I’ll have passed that milestone four months before.)

Speaking of which, are there any more upsides to being 80? I can’t think of any. I won’t even be able to hold a party, in the middle of a pandemic. Kajsa says I should look upon it as the ‘new 60’. But my body is not altogether convinced.

I don’t want to believe that Brexiters are stupider than Remainers, especially as anyone claiming they are is immediately marked out as an ‘élitist’ – that dreadful word – by Brexiters who will immediately reject his or her opinion for that reason alone. It’s not easy being a member of the intelligentsia in Britain just now. (Or, I would guess, in the USA.) Anti-intellectualism is an essential ingredient in the ‘populism’ that is a dominant factor in democratic politics today; exploited by people on the Right who are educated enough to know better – ‘we’ve had enough of experts’: Michael Gove – but who can see the cynical political advantage of appealing to it. Tell an ‘ordinary’ Brexiter that his or her opinions are foolish, and they’ll resent the implication that he or she is too. We can’t risk being seen to ‘look down’ on others from our giddy intellectual height. That’s no way to win an argument.

In any case, there’s no solid evidence that those who voted ‘Leave’ in 2016, and still stick with that opinion, are  more stupid than the Remainers. There have been surveys showing that Brexit voters tended to have a lower standard of education than pro-Europeans; but education doesn’t necessarily equate with ‘intelligence’, does it? (Seriously.) Nor are spelling and grammar mistakes – which seem to abound in pro-Brexit posts on social media – signs of stupidity on their own. Or even the Brexiteers’ clear misunderstandings of ‘sovereignty’ and the ‘blue passport’ issue (we could have had them even in the EU), or their failure to specify any other significant gains from our departure. It may be that the intelligent Brexiters simply don’t use Facebook. And it is further possible that there will be  benefits in the longer term, which only Brexiters are far-seeing enough to discern; less tangible ones, perhaps, but real nonetheless – like ‘global influence’ or ‘national pride’. One or two socialists voted to leave the EU because they saw it as an agent of world-wide neo-liberalism, which an independent Britain could reverse. That may have seemed a sound argument for a Leftist at the time – I gave it some thought – although it’s difficult to see the present political beneficiaries  of Brexit – free-marketist Conservatives almost to a man (and I mean men) – using our new sovereignty to free us from the grip of global capitalism. Rather the reverse. Again: racism – the reason many superior Remainers gave for the Brexit vote – may have been a factor for some; but there’s no evidence that this dominated. And of course many will have voted Remain for silly reasons too. Most analysts now agree that the motives behind the ‘No’ vote in 2016 were complex, and had more to do with a general ‘fed up-ness’ with life in Britain for other reasons, especially among the working and lower-middle classes, with ‘Europe’ simply being made the scapegoat; as I suggested at the very moment the fatal vote was taken: see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/, and https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/20/this-dreadful-referendum/. I’ve seen no reason since then to change those diagnoses (apart from the prognosis at the end of the second one!). Which makes the Brexiters clearly wrong, in my judgment; but not by that token necessarily stupid. 

My preferred way of looking at them – the ordinary voters for Brexit, that is, not their leaders – is that they were not stupid, but rather normally intelligent people who were grossly misled, by clever propagandists; ‘fooled’, in other words, rather than ‘foolish’. Should that make them feel any better? I don’t know. But why should we expect them not  to be fooled, with the whole European question an undeniably complex one, and few people – voters – having the grasp of it that the ‘intelligentsia’ were privy to. Perhaps they could have asked more questions; but that was genuinely difficult – impossible, I would say – when virtually the only information they had access to was from tainted sources. 

This of course is a common problem for democracy in Britain, and indeed anywhere else where newspapers (the ‘tainted sources’ I’m mainly thinking of) are unreliable, and the mass of people not much interested in ‘news’ in any case. And, I would add, where they’re not taught to question – ‘criticise’ in its constructive sense – in their schools. Voters brought up like this are bound to be easily swayed by well-financed (Arron Banks) and skilfully engineered (Cambridge Analytica) propaganda, playing on the people’s discontents, and to their ‘anti-establishment’ prejudices, but with its real motives and the selfish interests behind them – in the case of Brexit anti-socialism and freedom from anticipated EU limits on rich people’s tax-avoidance – cunningly disguised. Add a bit of political trickery to the mixture: a dodgy ‘referendum’, manipulating parliamentary procedures, monstering the Opposition, misleading the Queen, plus Boris’s happy smiling face as the cherry on top – optimism seems to be the only thing he has going for him – and abracadabra! the world, with all its beautiful island tax havens, is yours. 

I really don’t think the ‘people’ can be blamed for this; or credited with it, if your views go along with theirs. They weren’t stupid (or wise); just trapped within a discourse – as we intellectuals term it – that made it virtually impossible for them – 52% of them, at any rate; probably fewer now, but hey! the die has been cast – to consider the question of Britain’s relations with Europe on its merits. At bottom that discourse was created by the Press. It’s worth noting that not all countries have Presses as bad as Britain’s. Hers in fact is ranked 30th-odd in most scales of international ‘press freedom’: measuring ‘freedom’, that is, not simply in ‘market’ terms. Come to Sweden if you want to see the difference: Press reporting here is simply that, reporting, not opinion – that’s clearly marked as such, inside; and even the evening ‘tabloids’ have serious ‘Kultur’ sections. Papers like the Express and the Mail would be quite impossible here, let alone a joker like Johnson as a columnist; and consequently the kind of propaganda that British front-page headlines inflict on their readers – or those who just glance at them as they pass the newspaper racks in the supermarket – every day. I’ve not yet given enough thought to the underlying reasons for this, but it must have something to do with Sweden’s different social and political culture: more democratic, the Swedes claim; which also lies behind the more rational politicking  that goes on there. Experts are respected: possibly too much, in the light of the current ‘Swedish model’ of Coronovirus control. (We’ll have to see.) But this means that people’s prejudices  are not given so much play here as in Britain; together with Sweden’s having an educational system which – as I’ve mentioned before (https://bernardjporter.com/2018/03/01/kallkritik/) – encourages rational debate. Sweden might choose to leave the EU yet (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/22/brexit-swexit/); but if so it will be for less stupid reasons than Britain’s.

The same factors that lie behind Britain’s captive Press may also account for her people’s vulnerability to its message. After turning off the path of social democracy in the 1980s – while Sweden, incidentally, kept roughly to it – Britain became a more divided, devil-take-the-hindmost, uncaring society than she had been before, or at least than the post-War welfare settlement had been supposed to make her; with the rich (including newspaper proprietors) acquiring more muscle, to the detriment – eventually – of the poor. The result of this – and of other contemporary trends – was to ‘leave behind’ (as it was called in America) a large class of discontented men and women and their children, who felt the pain, conceived that their ruling class – even their ‘own’ political parties – were no longer fighting their corners for them, but didn’t fully understand why – education, again; and so eagerly fell upon the scapegoat that was put in front of them by the propagandists. The June 2016 vote was their way of getting back at the ‘Establishment’. And who could be surprised?

So we can’t blame them; or the principle of ‘democracy’, which some might be losing faith in after these events. For a start, the situation we’re in now vis-à-vis Europe is not what most people voted for – Corbyn’s compromise, remaining in the common market, was probably much closer to that – and indeed is not a settlement that the people are ever going to be allowed to vote on specifically. (‘You lost; get over it.’) That indicates the limitations of our ‘democracy’; which gives no real power to people who might have revised their opinion if it had been sought disentangled from their more general grievances, and in a discursive atmosphere that encouraged rational argument. They’re bright enough. It’s the political environment that’s at fault. 

Maybe the Government’s Brexit mess – together with its Coronavirus one – will encourage our ‘leaders’ to look more deeply and fundamentally at the way we are being represented, educated, informed and governed. Voting, constitutional, educational and press reforms would be a start. But don’t hold your breath. We’re on a downward path.  Facilis descensus Averno. (That’s the only bit of Virgil I remember from school. Mainly because ‘Averno’ is apparently grammatically wrong, but chosen by Virgil because he thought it sounded better. It was a delight to me to think that the Romans weren’t always as pedantic as Kennedy’s Latin Primer made them seem.) The Latin tag seems to fit here. But I’m a gloomy bugger just now, in post-Brexit Sweden, sheltering from the pandemic in our island fastness, but worrying all the time about what foolishness Britain’s government – emphatically not her people – still has in store for my country of origin.

The criminal incompetence of the current British government in the face of both Brexit and Covid is breathtaking. But that’s what you get when you elect a joker as PM at the start of a national crisis. It takes me back to an episode in my early life, when I participated in a ‘mock’ school election – held at the same time as a general election in the country – when another joker won; to the huge annoyance of the Headmaster, whose idea the ‘mock’ election was, in order to give us a serious lesson in our civic duties. I blogged about it a while ago: https://bernardjporter.com/2019/09/16/sideways-with-boris/. (Take a look.) Boris reminds me inescapably of ‘Daddy’ in that earlier encounter; and his electors of the people who raised him to power simply on the grounds that he made them laugh. Our old Headmaster would have been very cross. So should we be.

Most Brexiteers probably have no wish to live abroad – God forbid! –  but they might have spared a thought for those of us who do. My situation is not as dire as many expats’, having taken out dual citizenship in good time to preserve my ‘freedom of movement’ around Europe – and, I have to say, to grant me a refuge from the madness that just now seems to have afflicted Britain – but I’m still experiencing minor Brexit-related inconveniences.

One is that scarcely any post is reaching me now from the UK; and if it does it’s only after I’m made to fill in forms sent me by Postnord before it can be delivered. These are meant for me to tell them what’s in a package, when I often have no idea; after which they will – apparently – charge me customs duty. I’m currently waiting for several things that were posted before Christmas, for pity’s sake; including a bundle of letters and mags originally delivered to my Hull home and then sent on to me by Mike, my excellent house-sitter. (They include an American Left-wing journal; I wonder if Säpo is involved?) Of course this may be just Postnord’s notorious inefficiency. But I strongly suspect that Brexit is at the bottom of it. It was never like this before. 

Not as serious as trucks piled up at Dover, or fish being left to rot in Aberdeen, I grant you; or as the reputational damage to ‘Stor’ Brittannien this whole episode has caused, with our government now an international laughing stock, and the breakup of ‘Great Britain’ widely predicted. But a good reason for me never to order anything more from UK suppliers while I’m in Sweden. And to urge British correspondents to stick to email. Brexit hasn’t stopped that getting through yet.

PS (next day): I’ve just had a demand for 99 SEK (£9), VAT and customs and handling charges, before Postnord will deliver a package containing a DVD I ordered worth £8. (They’d looked inside.) Apparently that’s Brexit, too. Oh well: we still have our blue passports!

I hope the DVD is worth it. (It’s the Tony Palmer film about Berlioz.)