Porter’s Pensées

I finally resigned from the Labour Party last week, after being warned that I was in danger of being disciplined for ‘anti-semitism’ on the basis of a blog I wrote some time ago arguing that the problem of anti-semitism in the party was less serious than was being made out (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/28/anti-semitism-and-labour/). That seemed to be regarded as almost as egregious as holocaust denial. 

But that it was almost certainly true is evidenced by none other than the recent Equalities Commission report on Labour anti-semitism, which was universally presented by the press as having found against Labour; with the results that (a) the life-long anti-racist Jeremy Corbyn was suspended by the new party hierarchy for his continued ‘denial’; and (b) constituency parties were formally instructed never to raise or discuss the issue again. In fact the Report showed almost no evidence of Labour anti-semitism at all, with even the tiny number of examples it offered being highly debatable. (The old Ken Livingstone slur was one.) Here is the Middle East correspondent Jonathan Cook’s account of the whole affair: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-11-07/ehrc-labour-antisemitism-corbyn/. In my view it’s unanswerable.

But that’s water under the bridge now. The reputation of the Labour Party will probably never recover from its popular image, entirely unfounded, of having been ‘30%’ anti-semitic at one time (the real figure was 0.3%); and the reputation of British Jewry may never recover – as I wrote recently (https://bernardjporter.com/2020/11/01/plots-and-paranoia/) – from the suspicion that it may have ‘conspired’ to prevent a left-wing government coming to power, and hence have helped bring about the appalling political situation in which Britain finds itself now. 

I find this infinitely depressing. I’ve tried to transfer my political feelings over to Sweden, where I’ve just been admitted to Vänsterpartiet (the Left Party); but I find I can’t shake off my concern for my other national identity (still), or my utter despair at its apparent descent into a pit of falsehoods, propaganda and lies; taking my beloved Labour Party, of which I was an active member for nearly 60 years, with it. How do Lefties in Britain who are without the comfort of a foreign asylum to flee to, cope?

For four years now I’ve regarded Trump as the perfect personification of the country he’s been leading into its end-capitalist stage. The greed, the amorality, the boasting, the lack of regard for human life and welfare by the side of profit, the Barnum & Bailey showmanship, the mafia-like corruption, even the bankruptcies: all would feature in any fictional character one would like to invent as representing ‘The Way we Are Now’ (see https://bernardjporter.com/2018/10/26/philip-green/). Of course, it might appear unbelievable if this character were to appear in a novel; but that is – was – the nature of the beast. Trump was a larger than life president, a caricature of even the worst qualities of capitalism; but if the present time does represent the final stage of capitalism before it collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions, as Marx predicted and some Leftists still hope (I don’t: I’ve too much to lose), Trump would be the perfect man to bring the curtain down on its Götterdämmerung.

But of course there are other Americas, one of which appears to have mercifully prevailed last week; and other forms of capitalism. Capitalism is (though this is an imperfect simile) rather like the rain: a force of nature, enormously beneficial at best, but easily perverted, and needing to be controlled and sheltered against if it is not to soak us and flood us all out. Both of its most distinguished historical theoreticians saw it like this: Adam Smith, whose free marketism was far more interventionist than Trump’s (or Reagan’s, or Thatcher’s), and Marx, who denied that any form of intervention – ‘bourgeois liberalism’, or what we would today call ‘democratic socialism’ – could ever finally stem the collapse. If Joe Biden lives up to his billing, therefore (Bernie would have been better!), we might see Marxism finally discredited. More Trump would have had the opposite effect.

Well, what a relief! We celebrated last night with a bottle of champagne. It wasn’t quite the delirious occasion that Obama’s first victory was (I was in Kentucky then); but that turned out to be a little disappointing in the end – not entirely his fault – and in the meantime we’ve had the nightmare of four years of Trumpism to measure any success against. And whatever our doubts about how transformative a Biden-Harris administration can be, we should be allowed our little moment of naïve optimism in the meantime. When the effects of the champagne wear off, we can return to the struggle. Or rather, the Americans can.

Except it’s not just their victory, is it? Apart from almost the whole world seeming to rejoice in the result – my own predominant image of the USA, which I know well, has changed overnight, from den of iniquity to shining city on the hill (almost) – it also has practical resonances for us. For America was not alone in its ‘Trumpism’, although the populist nationalism that he represented took different forms in different countries. In Britain of course it was ‘Brexit’, represented by the clown Boris and the snake Nigel; both of whom – Nigel especially – have been cosying up to Trump in recent years. He had his admirers in Turkey, Hungary, Israel and even Sweden too. In all those countries (except Sweden) a version of Trumpism has been the dominant power in politics. Rupert Murdoch – the owner of Fox News, the main propaganda agency of Trumpism in America – has his fingers in many other national political pies, including of course Britain’s. How this will affect them is hard to predict as yet. Farage will lose the £10,000 he wagered on a Trump victory. (What odds did he get, I wonder?) Murdoch is apparently rowing back on his support for Trump – as of course the vile old opportunist always does when he sees one of his stocks going down. (He did the same with the British Tories in 1997.) Fox News earned the ire of Trump by confirming his defeat in Arizona early. Bibi Netanyahu was apparently the last international statesperson to congratulate Biden formally on his victory, and most Israeli commentators expect the latter to take a different line on, for example, Israeli settlements and Palestine. Boris Johnson has sailed too close to Trump’s slipstream – Biden has referred to him as the ‘British Trump’ – to make it easy for him to tack over to the new dispensation. A Brexit-compensating trade deal with America is widely thought to be less likely than it was under Trump in view of the part-Irish Biden’s openly expressed concern for its impact on the Good Friday agreement. I wouldn’t like to speculate on the election’s relevance for Turkey and Hungary. I just don’t know enough about them.

I don’t know enough about America, either, despite longish periods living there, to feel qualified to add to the commentary on the effect and significance of these events there, beyond what American critics have already provided in abundance. All I can contribute is a bit of context. First of all is the observation (again) that Trumpism is – was – not only an American phenomenon, but part of an international reaction, based on genuine but only partially formulated and understood grievances, fuelled by ignorance and stupidity and exploited by unscrupulous elites. Secondly I’d suggest that underneath all this lies – here comes the ideology – the inexorable historical self-destructive decline of capitalism, just as our old friend Marx foretold, although in forms he could not possibly have predicted. (Trump personified late, corrupt capitalism to a T.) Whether Biden’s glorious victory can slow or reverse this trend remains to be seen. I fervently hope so; but not with any great confidence. Even if the Donald can be dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House next January, Trumpism’s not going to disappear, is it? In the meantime, thank you so much America, for reviving your foreign friends’ hopes; for a while at least.

As an election junkie based in Sweden I’m following proceedings day and night; this time on my laptop via CNN. I have to say their reporting and analysis are superb – when they allow the reporters and analysts on. The only problem for me is the interminable ‘commercial breaks’, which don’t actually carry the commercials that I presume American audiences are shown. Instead they repeat over and over an advert for one of CNN’s own programmes, called ‘Quest’ – or it may be ‘Quince’ or ‘Queer’ – ‘on Business’, featuring the most irritating man I’ve ever seen on TV – I think he’s British – cavorting ridiculously around a maze which is meant to symbolise the commercial world, before turning on a fountain in the centre with the cry: ‘What a profitable day!’ I can turn the sound off, but not the picture without the risk of missing some fascinating analysis of postal votes from the suburbs of Detroit, or wherever. Still, excellent work, CNN, if it’s not all ‘fake’, as Trump seems to think.

It looks at present – midday Thursday Swedish time – as if Biden might win, although it’s by no means certain. That of course adds to the fascination of the event for people like me; so long as we put out of our minds the crucial importance of this election not only to America but to us in Britain and the rest of America’s declining world-wide empire. Best to view it like an American football game; which is how it’s presented on US TV. Several commentators are saying how ‘enjoyable’ it is.

I’m looking forward – if I’m allowed to – to the aftermath of the count, and the behaviour of the Donald and his disciples if they are ‘cheated’ out of their rightful victory. But I confess I’m glad that I’ll be viewing it from a distance. Looking out from our sunny island home over the bay and beyond the trees (below, pic taken just now), it all seems sorta crazy; a bit of a ‘mardröm’, as we Swedes would say. Let’s hope we all wake up soon.

Of course it’s what we might have expected of the final stage of a collapsing late-capitalist system. Especially if Trump – the very personification of late capitalism – wins again. More on this later.

HG Wells is mainly famous as a writer of science fiction, but his novels on domestic subjects, although rather more tied to their period (the early 1900s), are worth reading still. He wrote of course as a Socialist, of the Fabian kind. A work of his that has come to my mind as I prepare, nervously, for the American Presidential election, is his 1908 novel Tono-Bungay, featuring a crooked salesman who reminds me of one of the two contenders in the current race. 

The villain of Tono-Bungay – George Ponderevo – comes a cropper in the end, as wicked capitalists so often do in Victorian and Edwardian novels. One American historian some years ago (Martin Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980) suggested that this literary tradition was one of the factors that held British capitalism back in the twentieth century, by contrast with America. Thatcher loved that; it encouraged her artistic philistinism. The USA must have a similar tradition of anti-capitalist novels; but nothing I imagine powerful enough to take on Ayn Rand. Which is why I’m not at all confident of Trump’s career following the trajectory of George Ponderevo’s; and will have my bottle of Southern Comfort close at hand to give me – well, comfort – as I follow the results over the next few hours, days, weeks or months on TV. 

I’ve been criticised – not here, but on Facebook – for asserting that the past, and still current, controversy over ‘anti-semitism’ in the Labour Party risks making the problem, such as it is, worse. In other words, Labour members and supporters might be turned into anti-semites by the campaign being waged against this very evil. One of my Facebook critics raises a comparison with the Black Lives Matter movement: what if I had claimed that BLM was only likely to provoke anti-black racism? And might not this claim in relation to anti-semitism indicate deep-buried anti-semitic feelings on my part?

But there are differences here. Anti-anti-semitism is a cause which, of course, I unreservedly support. But in its current and recent manifestation it stands apart from other anti-racist movements in at least one crucial way. That is in its exploitation and weaponization by political Rightists – not Labour – for their own extraneous ends.

First, let’s get a couple of things straight. I hope all of us can agree with these two propositions. Number one: Jeremy Corbyn is not, and has never to my knowledge been, anti-semitic himself. His Jewish constituents have forcefully attested to this, including Professor Geoffrey Alderman, the leading historian of the Jews in Britain, and my old friend Miriam Margolyes – who I have an idea votes in his constituency. You can find literally scores of similar testimonies from British Jews if you Google for them.

Secondly, there is no way in which the active Labour membership can be characterised as anti-semitic; certainly not from my own experience of fifty-odd years in several Labour Party branches, and from – again – many testimonies on the web. As many of us have conceded, there must be some Labour supporters who are this way inclined, as there are in all walks of life; but far fewer – and this is important – than in parties of the Right. This may be why Labour was so slow to set in motion measures to eradicate anti-semitism in its ranks: most of us simply couldn’t credit that it could be a significant problem in a party (and with a leader) whose stand against racism was one of the pillars of our faith. We were taken aback by what seemed to us be such a monstrous charge. In fact the recent Inquiry into this question, if you look into it, offers scarcely any evidence of institutional or embedded or active anti-semitism in the party’s ranks. Its main criticism is of Labour’s failures to deal with ‘it’ early enough; and of the leadership’s supposed interference with the disciplinary process after it got going seriously in 2018. Ludicrously, some of that criticism is against the leadership for trying to expedite the process, not block it or slow it down. To me, Labour still appears – relatively – squeaky clean. 

This is not to say that a great deal of work does not need to be done in the population generally, to make it aware of ways in which Jews might feel they are traduced or discriminated against, whether justly or not, in order to make all of us more sensitive. The Jews after all have had a horrible history (to put it mildly), in the light of which it is understandable that they should be especially vigilant. Vigilance, of course, can easily lead to paranoia; which Jews should beware of, just as much as the rest of us. I don’t believe, however, that the current anti-anti-semitic campaign against the Labour Party is a product of paranoia. I might respect it more if it were.

What it’s a product of is a desire to bring Corbyn down because of two of his political stands, neither of them related to anti-semitism per se. The first is his socialism, which is seen as a threat to the British Establishment, and especially to those – non-Jews! – who own most of our deplorable popular press. The second is his support for the Palestine liberation movement, which some Zionists – not all – regard as a threat to the state of Israel. If he had become British Prime Minister, Corbyn would have been the first to openly support a Palestinian state (alongside the existing state of Israel). Some Israelis, of course, also support this; but not those who are in power just now. They want to expand the boundaries of the Israeli state – the ‘settlement movement’ – instead; turning Arab villages into, effectively, ‘Bantustans’. The means by which they seek to do this are illegal and often violent. (Which doesn’t excuse, though it may help explain, the violence of the Palestinians.) Back home in Israel, but to a much lesser extent in the diaspora, they can also be pretty explicitly racist, against both Arabs and Africans; far more so than we would tolerate in Britain. These should be no friends of the British Labour party; which was – remember – a great friend of Israel in the early days, when it aspired to socialism: the kibbutzin, and all that. 

But that’s by the bye. The essential point here is that much of the propaganda against the Labour Party on account of its supposed ‘anti-semitism’ has been stirred up, fomented, exaggerated and often simply invented by people who ‘have it in for’ Labour for other reasons entirely. Otherwise why should they single out the least racist party in the British political system? In fact what is called the ‘Israel lobby’, mainly represented in Britain by the unrepresentative Jewish Board of Deputies, with the help of Mossad – that’s been admitted on tape – together with other reactionary non-Jewish groups in Britain, have deliberately sown the idea of Labour as a distinctively anti-semitic party in order to discredit it. They know how the mere mention of anti-semitism is likely to play among decent people in Britain, well aware as we are of the Nazi Holocaust, which most of us regard as the greatest crime in all history. Being smeared with anti-semitism is almost as bad as being accused of paedophilia. That’s why the Right has seized on it and played it up. Some of them are quite open about this. Apart from the few who may genuinely believe it, it’s as opportunistic as that.

Which bring me – if you’ve been following me so far; the context is important – to my main point. The measures taken by the Right deliberately to implant this idea in the minds of people looks like, or can easily be made to look like, what is called a ‘conspiracy’. Liberal people quite rightly distrust ‘conspiracy theories’, especially after Donald Trump’s widespread deployment of them throughout his presidency to undermine his opponents and critics – ‘fake news’, and the rest. In this case, however, there definitely was a conspiracy behind the 2019 election result, whether or not it was a main factor behind Labour’s defeat; and one which, unfortunately, involved a section of the Jewish community and a foreign Jewish state. 

This is why it could, in time, provoke an anti-semitic backlash among Labour voters. Supposed Jewish ‘conspiracies’ have been a staple of historic anti-semitism since the time of Christ – whether it was drinking the blood of newborn babies, controlling world capitalism, those ‘protocols of the Elders of Zion’, or fomenting wars. All of them – I would say – are nonsense. It’s because we don’t believe them that we’re not anti-semitic. But now up springs this new ‘conspiracy’, which is much more believable, and certainly true in some regards; which may (only ‘may’) have influenced history big-time; and which involves Jews. If it doesn’t feed into this anti-semitic trope I’ll be surprised. Which is why I fear that the anti-anti-semitic campaign pursued by the Right and by certain Jews over the past year or so, dishonest in so many regards, may have been counter-productive. It will have done nothing to ingratiate those on the Left of British politics with ‘the Jews’. I’m not affected, because I don’t think of Jews in that way (with the definite article). But then I’m an anti-racist. Like Corbyn.

What to say?  It was so unnecessary, wasn’t it – to suspend Jeremy Corbyn from the Party for nothing worse than claiming that the ‘Labour antisemitism’ issue – genuine or not: and Corbyn never claimed that there wasn’t an issue – had been exaggerated and exploited for extraneous motives?  Starmer has nothing to gain from this, surely; certainly not insofar as the membership is concerned. Thousands are resigning from the party right now. (I’m one of them – just sent off the letter. This is after more than 50 years membership and of what they call ‘activism’.) It looks merely spiteful: surely by merely replacing Corbyn as leader Starmer had done enough to calm down his right wing. So far as the wider public is concerned: how many of them would be put off Labour simply because Corbyn was still in the party? Or will be more attracted to a leader who shows he can wield the whip?

I’m waiting to read the EHRC Report into Labour antisemitism in detail. (Is it on the internet?) What I’ll be looking for there are concrete examples of anti-Jewish prejudice or actions within the Labour Party over the past few years; examples which so far as I know – and I’ve been following this pretty closely: see my earlier posts – none of the Party’s critics has so far put into the public domain. (It goes without saying that criticism of the Netanyahu government and support for Palestinians won’t be included here.) If there are many such examples of genuine antisemitism – more than you would expect, for example, in a random sample of people – I may change my opinion. But I’m unlikely to alter my view of Jeremy Corbyn, whom as I understand it even the Report doesn’t claim is personally anti-Semitic – but rather the reverse. In fact I’m encouraged and warmed by the plethora of letters on Facebook from Jews corroborating this, and who are as appalled by his suspension as I am.

The Labour Left is divided on the issue of whether they should leave the Party or remain to try to influence it from the inside. I’ve made my decision, because I simply feel uncomfortable in an organisation that could act so irrationally and autocratically; and because I no longer live in Britain (much) anyway. In fact at the same time as finalising my resignation from Labour, I’ve just applied the join the Swedish Vänsterpartiet; which – despite its Communist origins – is the closest here in my land of refuge to the sort of social democracy I’ve always espoused.

Lastly: my lifelong love and respect for Jews and their culture is being sorely tested by this. If it weren’t for Jeremy’s Jewish champions, and my own Jewish friends, I might be tempted into anti-Semitic generalisations myself. I hope I’m above this; but British Jews shouldn’t be surprised if other Leftists aren’t turned into anti-Semites byhe very campaign that some of their leaders claimed was directed against it. If their real motive was shielding an oppressive right-wing regime in Israel, as has been suggested, they should ask themselves: was it really worth this?

PS (the next day). I recall that three months ago I almost sent in my resignation, only to be persuaded by my local Constituency Secretary to hold my fire to see if things got better. My reasons for wanting to resign then are spelled out in this blog: https://bernardjporter.com/2020/08/17/8636/. Clearly the situation has not improved in the meantime; and that original grievance – the stifling of free discussion in the Party – should be added to this latest one.

With no more proper historical work on hand or even on the horizon for me just now – apart from proof-reading my latest and almost certainly my last book, which is only a re-hash of old essays after all – my mind is turning back to an idea that I’ve been toying with for some years now of writing a work of historical fiction, based on the real history I’ve studied, but with bits of it made up. Not a novel set in historical times, I think, because I’d be no good at characterisation, or at plotting, which is why I turned to history rather than fiction in the first place (‘the problem with you, Bernard’, as my old English master once told me, in words that have resonated with me down the years, ‘is that you have no imagination’); but – I’m now thinking – a work of ‘alternative’ or ‘What If…?’ history.

You know the sort of thing: what if the Reformation hadn’t happened? Or Hitler had won the last War? Or Lindbergh had won the 1940 American Presidential election? Or the Neanderthals had beaten back the Cro-Magnons? (There are novels based on all these scenarios.) It’s a fairly popular little literary sub-genre; sometimes scoffed at by serious historians, but not by me. In order to understand and explain what happened in history, you need to consider alternatives. Otherwise you can be left with the sorts of answer one of my Fundamentalist Christian students gave to every exam question I put to him involving causation (this was in the late ’60s): ‘God willed it.’ (I think we persuaded him to change courses.) Or, alternatively, some other notion of ‘inevitability’. It’s only by considering fictional alternatives that we can truly understand how things have come about.

I’ve considered a number of these possible ‘alternative histories’. One that I aired on this blog several years ago cast Thatcher as a communist agent, plotting to return capitalism to the road predicted by Marx, in order to create the conditions for a genuine socialist revolution. Another was focussed on the life of Marx himself, suggesting that he didn’t really die in 1883 (I have British secret service evidence for that!), but instead went on to play cricket for Gloucestershire. (I’ll explain that some other time.) A third has the European 1848 revolutions succeeding in Britain and installing a socialist (or ‘Chartist’) government there. Then what follows….? 

That last narrative is in fact is the one I’m inclining to just now, presented not in novelistic form (because of my lack of imagination), but as the kind of history book that might have been written if it had really happened. I’ve got masses of archival material which can be twisted to this end, an understanding of many of the characters who would have been involved, and experience, of course, in writing history textbooks. Once I get those proofs read, and if I can sustain my enthusiasm and summon up the energy – at a rather low ebb just now, I’m afraid – I’ll get down to it. Wish me luck.

We watched it the other day on Amazon Prime. It was as toe-curling as they warned us, and quite disgusting (sorry, but I’ve never much gone for the sight of menstrual blood); but horribly funny and brilliant. The Rudy scene is almost unwatchable; but for me the most shocking part was when he came out with his conspiracy theory about ‘the Chinese virus’. I won’t spoil the film for you by giving away the denouement.

If the film endures it won’t be because of its politics or satire, both of which are ephemeral (one hopes), but because of its quite beautiful portrayal of the developing relationship between Borat and his daughter, played dangerously but astonishingly well by Maria Bakalova. ‘Best supporting actress’ at the Oscars?

That the upcoming American Presidential election is the most important for many generations hardly needs saying; determining as it may well do which of the two major trends in American history until now – the liberal-progressive (in the old European sense of the word ‘liberal’) or the capitalist-authoritarian (tending to fascism) – will prevail over the next several years. OK, that’s an over-simplification of the present American political scene; but it’s one way of looking at the difference between Biden and Trump.

That it could also be crucial for Europe, and for Britain in particular, was pointed out the other day in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/24/johnson-will-wait-for-us-election-result-before-no-deal-brexit-decision. The argument there is that a Trump victory would vastly encourage the ‘hard’ Brexiters, who would see it as confirming their own analysis of the dominant trend in present-day world history – nationalist, populist and reactionary – and so an encouragement to the proto-fascists in the present government; and to those who – for example – want to snuggle up to the USA over their tasty snacks of chlorinated chicken wings. Johnson’s Brexit deal – unannounced so far – will apparently depend on which of these two sides prevails. If it’s Trump’s, then Britain could very well cede effective economic control to America, so becoming what we imperial historians call an ‘informal colony’ of our former subjects. A Biden win will be more problematical for Boris, but possibly better for the rest of us Brits.

On the other hand, there’s also another view of the Conservatives’ preferences. Huffington Post thinks they’re peeling off over to Biden: https://yrtnews.com/huffpost-british-conservatives-are-finally-going-public-with-their-support-for-joe-biden/. That probably relates to the less dogmatic Brexiteers. Which of these two sides will prevail is anyone’s guess.

Anyway, enjoy the razzmatazz and drama which American elections usually put on for us; as an American politics junkie I’ll be sitting up in front of the TV next Tuesday/Wednesday watching it all night, or longer, if it’s not resolved by then. Do remember however that it’s not just for entertainment, but is serious; not only for them, but also for us over on the other side of the pond.