Porter’s Pensées

My new edition of The Lion’s Share, now in the press and due out on the 23^rdof this month, has a chapter on the legacy of the Empire to Britain. That barely mentions Rupert Murdoch, who must be one of the ex-Empire’s most malevolent influences on our (British) way of life and politics over the past fifty years; that is, since he was taken under her wing by Thatcher and then appeased by Blair. I wonder if I can add something about this to the final set of proofs? If you want an example of the ‘Empire Striking Back’, this must be it.

Australia’s malevolent influence on us may not end with Murdoch. We learn today – if the report can be trusted – that Tony Abbott, perhaps Australia’s most controversial ex-prime minister, has been appointed to the Board entrusted with organising Britain’s post-Brexit trade, in the face of widespread opposition to him on the grounds of his known views on other matters. Those views were famously challenged by another Aussie PM in 2012:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2012/oct/09/australia-pm-gillard-misogynist-video;

and then by a refreshingly forceful Sky News interviewer just a few days ago:

https://news.sky.com/story/tony-abbott-matt-hancock-defends-misogynist-ex-australia-pm-over-possible-trade-role-12062211.

For any self-respecting liberal or progressive, Abbott ought to be the worst person in the world to represent the ‘mother country’ in any role at all. But then of course liberals and progressives aren’t the forces they used to be in Britain just a few years ago. Abbott’s reactionary views are now in the ascendant; not numerically, perhaps, but by virtue of the power now acquired – partly through subterfuge, I would say – by the Far Right. This period in our history, with a government majority in the Commons of 80+ and another general election as much as four years away, is clearly the best time for Cummings and his puppets to inflict all kinds of reactionary shocks on us, politically, constitutionally, culturally, and even in the realm of humour – with ‘left-wing’ comedians now being officially targeted by the boss of the BBC. What I used to call ‘The Great Reaction’ when it started under Thatcher is coming to a head. No wonder many are now fearing ‘Fascism’; which of course can come in many guises.

Boris Johnson is an admirer of the old British Empire, of which Australia used to be a part, and is ambitious to revive it – or the ‘white’ part of it, anyway – in some form or another. This may be one explanation for his recruitment of Abbott, in addition to the latter’s politically incorrect views. It so happens that Australia is one of my favourite countries, and the one I was happiest living in. But I do resent its shipping these people over to us, when we have plenty of villains of our own. Is it our fault, for what we did to them all those years ago? Murdoch’s father, for example, was turned against Britain by the appalling conduct of her generals at Gallipoli – the campaign that first enshrined Australia’s national day. Now the Aussies are retaliating; flinging our 19^th-century attitudes back in our faces. 

Eton College has furnished us (the British) with twenty prime ministers. Two of them have been pretty good, on the whole – Gladstone and the 3^rd Marquess of Salisbury. Most of the rest have been rubbish. 

One of the most rubbish was the 5^th Earl of Rosebery, prime minister from March 1894 to June 1895. He was a ‘Liberal Imperialist’, but also projected himself as a social reformer. He had ‘charisma’, and a – sometimes confusing – way with words. His ambition was always to be prime minster; but before that he served as Chairman of the new London County Council, and then as a not very distinguished Foreign Secretary. When he eventually became PM – succeeding Gladstone – he turned out to be hopeless. Contemporaries said that this was because he didn’t put the work into it. As one of them put it: he wanted the accolade without the effort – ‘the palm without the dust’. 

Remind you of anyone?

Too much can be made of ‘charisma’. Britain’s greatest peacetime Prime Minister – Clement Attlee – had none at all. Jeremy Corbyn, of course, was reckoned to be pretty deficient in this regard. That may have contributed to his defeat. Those on the other hand who are credited with most of it have very often been disasters. Boris is only the latest example.

Here in Sweden we presently have a Prime Minister who would score pretty low in most charisma tests; but who amongst you in Britain (or the USA) wouldn’t prefer his solid, straightforward honesty over the empty rhetoric, lies and tricksiness that make Johnson and Trump so apparently attractive to the poor, repressed sods who vote for them? We’re doing OK over here, thanks, with the solid ex-welder Stefan Löfven in charge.

Am I a coward for having fled from it all? Here in reactionary Sweden – reactionary in the sense of still clinging on to progressive ideas – almost all the news from Britain and the USA is alarming.

The demonstration the other day in London against coronavirus restrictions – by all accounts including a fair number of the ‘tinfoil hat’ brigade, and following a similar demo in Berlin, and shoot-outs, even, in America – makes one fear for the collective sanity of whole nations. Of course, even the largest demonstration isn’t necessarily representative, and there may be a good case to be made for letting the virus run wild amongst us oldies in the interests of ‘herd immunity’ (is that right?); but it can’t be altogether sane, can it, if David Icke, Jeremy Corbyn’s iffy brother and the American Evangelical lobby (‘Jesus will protect us’) are among the marchers. Then there’s all the overt racism springing up after we thought we had educated it out of people; the sheer madness of Brexit; and this latest scheme by Murdoch and others to set up a ‘Fox News’-type TV channel in Britain (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/aug/29/rivals-plan-fox-news-style-opinionated-tv-station-in-uk) to counter the ‘left-wing’ bias (!) of the BBC.

Having recently re-watched the latest BBC documentary series on Murdoch’s ‘rise, fall and rise again’, currently being shown on Swedish TV, I shudder at the implications of that. TV simply to entertain, with the easiest way of entertaining being to shock: that was the formula that drove the earliest capitalist profit-seeking tabloid newspaper barons in Britain around 1900 (John Field knows about that), to the whole nation’s detriment since. A tabloid TV channel in Britain would set the seal on that descent into the sort of media hell that brought Trump to the White House in 2016, and might even revive the justly derided Boris’s fortunes in No. 10. What chance for the Left, and for rationality, and even for the world (cue climate change), in that case?

Corbyn might have stopped it; or, rather, a Labour government with Corbyn’s policies but with a leader less easily demonised by the tabloid press. The alliance between rich tax-dodging media-owning capitalists, the ‘Israel Lobby’ (‘Israel’, not ‘Jewish’), and those clever computer nerds in Cambridge Analytica, acting on people’s fears and prejudices, turned out to be too much for us in 2019; and will be for the future, if we don’t find a better way of combatting them. It’s a huge task, involving radical political, economic, moral and social reform, which it’s hard to see coming soon. Even if this present incompetent government self-destructs, it’s difficult to see an acceptable alternative arising. A more charismatic leader might help; but in a society that bestows ‘charisma’ on clowns like Boris and Nigel Farage that’s not exactly promising. What we probably need is a revolution. But that isn’t Britain’s way, is it?

I feel guilty for hiding away from it all; but of course the news still reaches me across the North Sea, and strikes at me as much as it would back in Hull. I couldn’t do any more there than I can from here. I’m no good at organising, a poor public speaker, and too lame even to go pamphleting. My next two publications – a new edition of an old work, and a collection of past essays: really I’m living off my fat just now – both have chapters excoriating the present madness, but they won’t gather anything like the same readership as books on similar themes by snake-oil celebrities like Johnson and Rees-Mogg. I can’t write the sort of stuff that would get me into the tabloids, or on Fox TV-UK. If we did have a revolution – and if it were the right sort, not a ‘populist’ putsch – I’d fly over straight away and hobble to the barricades. But that won’t happen, will it?

Gosh I miss those few days of naïve hope last December! Hope is the worst thing to be taken from us. OK, my fault, I know.

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Porter flyer-2Porter flyer-2

This I think is the final straw for me. It’s an email from the General Secretary of the Labour Party, David Evans, to Constituency branches, telling them what topics branches can and cannot discuss.

‘This will ensure that the business your local party is conducting is appropriate, minimises any challenge to its decisions and does not leave the party – locally and nationally – or its officers open to potential legal liabilities.’

A number of topics are covered in the email, some of them procedural; but the main ones refer to the recent debate on ‘anti-semitism’ in the party.  It’s the last that concerns me most. The IHRA ‘definition’ of antisemitism is, in the minds of most scholars, highly flawed, and by seeming to conflate antisemitism with criticism of Israeli governments has done untold and unmerited damage to the reputation of the Jewish community among many Labour members and supporters. Now however we are told that we aren’t allowed even to discuss it.

Here’s that last instruction.

IHRA definition of antisemitism

We are aware that some CLPs and branches have had motions tabled to “repudiate” the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition of antisemitism and its examples was properly adopted by the Labour Party in September 2018. CLPs and branches have no powers to overturn this decision. Furthermore, such motions undermine the Labour Party’s ability to tackle racism. Any such motions are therefore not competent business for CLPs or branches.

As per the previous general secretary’s instruction, any discussion about ongoing disciplinary cases remains prohibited.

This was obviously done under pressure – real or imagined – from what might be called the ‘Israel lobby’ and its press supporters. But whatever the provocation, I’m afraid I can no longer remain a member of a party that curbs civilised free speech in this way. This blog has probably made me liable to expulsion in any case; but I’ll save the party the trouble.

Where I’m to go to now I can’t tell. I no longer have a political home in Britain. As a demi-Swede I may try Vänsterpartiet here: formerly the Communists, but now the closest to Corbyn’s and Attlee’s party I can find anywhere. Of course I’ll still vote Labour in England, and wish Keir Starmer well; but he can have my membership card (of 50 years) back.

Speaking of science fiction… My friend Ken recently put me on to a new author – new to me, that is – whose books I am avidly gobbling for my holiday reading just now. His name is Cixin Liu, and I can heartily recommend him to aficionados of ‘hard’ Sci-Fi. By that I mean Science Fiction with big ideas, embracing the whole cosmos, and alternative civilisations and human – or other – conditions that force us to think anew about our own. My great heroes in this kind of genre have always been HG Wells (The Time Machine), Ursula le Guin (The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness), and Olaf Stapledon (Starmaker and First and Last Man): writers whose minds soared above those of the rest of us, but from a basis of genuine scientific knowledge – chemistry for Wells, anthropology for le Guin, philosophy for Stapledon – which stopped them sinking into mere ‘Fantasy’. (Although le Guin is celebrated in that genre too.)

Cixin Liu is Chinese, which gives his writings an interesting dimension for Western readers; and his scientific ‘base’ is IT. You’d have thought that might make him slightly nerdish. But not at all; he too soars magnificently, and into so many different ‘alternative’ futures and situations as to make one wonder at his imagination. I started with his best-known work, The Three Body Problem, whose science I barely understood, but without that making much of a difference to my enjoyment of it.  Just now I’m reading The Wandering Earth: a collection of longish ‘short stories’. I’d recommend that as a starting point. After these, I have, happily, two more to read.

I hate it when people equate Science Fiction with Star Wars, Star Trek, and other popular examples of the genre which are really no more than Westerns with rocket ships. The best SF is cerebral. Even for a historian, engaged in the actual past, reading it can put that past into a context that no other genre of writing can.

I have to admit, however, that I initially acquired my love of SF at the age of 10 from the ‘Dan Dare’ strip in the Eagle. That was really based on World War II: with the Treens as Nazis and their evil leader, the Mekon, as Hitler with a big head. (Since then he’s reminded me of Dominic Cummings: https://bernardjporter.com/2019/09/11/separated-at-birth/.) There was nothing to really stretch the imagination there. But what more could you expect in 1951? And the great Frank Hampson’s artwork was superb.

‘Algorithms’ have suddenly come to be the magic solution to all problems. I think I’ve been a little behind the curve in realising this. Wikipedia defines the algorithm as

a finite sequence of well-defined, computer-implementable instructions, typically to solve a class of problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are always unambiguous, and are used as specifications for performing calculations, data processing, automated reasoning, and other tasks.

By feeding key words, key statistics and key facts into a computer programme they can – for example – tell Amazon what topics I am likely to be interested in, and so what books I might want to order from them next time around; advise political parties which way I lean opinion-wise – perhaps from my Amazon orders; and tell examining boards what grades I ‘would’ have got if I had been able sit my A-levels this year.

The firms and organisations that compile and crunch these algorithms, therefore, are likely to be immensely powerful. It’s possible that they delivered the EU referendum to the Brexiteers in 2016, the General Election to the Tories in 2019 (they certainly helped), and all those socially-discriminating A-level scores to poor sixth-formers this month. The method is known to have its dark side. The disgraced Cambridge Analytica worked with algorithms. Dominic Cummings appears to be deep into them – they’re what give him his reputation for almost superhuman political judgment, and his value, therefore, to our simple-minded but willing-to-be-led prime minister.

It’s possible that the current row over A-levels – with socio-economic ‘facts’ having been used to down-grade students in ‘lower’ areas of the country while maintaining high grades for Public (in the British sense) schools – will undermine confidence in the whole method. At least one Oxford college has stated that it will honour its offers to applicants made on grounds of their previous school work and teachers’ references, even if their analyticised grades seem to make them less worthy. Good for Worcester College! Expect there to be more disillusionment with the system when GCSE results come out.

As a devotee of utopian and dystopian science fiction, it seems to me that a society run by algorithms fits squarely into the latter category. In its search for objectivity and certainty among complexity and confusion, it takes little account of human judgment. Society is a machine; either robotically controlled, or controlled (in the case of politics) by a group of clever people manipulating it for their own ends. In either case its implications must be profoundly undemocratic; even if those of us on the Left could learn how to pull its levers and press its buttons too. The best we can do is warn.

If a nation’s identity is formed by its history, at least in part, then Britain at present appears to be forming a new identity in contravention of hers. I can scarcely believe what I see happening over the water in my country of birth these days: Tories wetting themselves over an ‘invasion’ of poor refugees in rubber boats on the Kent coast – or is that only Farage? please dear God let it be so – and a Government coming very close to a kind of Fascism in what it plans and what it has already done. Of course all these trends have precedents in earlier periods of British history, but they were never dominant, and never part of the ‘progressive’ narrative which I always liked to believe defined us more.

My new book of essays, Britain Before Brexit, due out I think early next year, bears on this; with its main theme – if there is one, in a very disparate collection – being the way that Britain’s and the European Union’s identities have changed, and indeed very largely reversed, over the past fifty years. From being the most generous European country to refugees and immigrants in the 19^th century, we have become the meanest; from the most open we have become the most surveilled; from the most democratic, one of the least so; from a country where ‘a gentleman’s word is his bond’, a sink of public deceit and corruption; and from the country with the free-est press in Europe, to one now ranked near the bottom of the scale. History no longer counts for anything in our view of ourselves.

By ‘we’ of course I’m referring to my British half. We Swedes are just as appalled.