Porter’s Pensées

Many years ago I developed a theory about the British aristocracy. This was long before Monty Python, or Blackadder Series 3, and before I had read any PG Wodehouse; but after I had met some of them at Cambridge. (It was they who put me on to Wodehouse.)

My theory was this. They – and all their accoutrements, including the Public schools – had survived so long in Britain, while France for example was joyfully guillotining its own aristos, because of the image they had learned to cultivate of cuddly eccentricity, too dumb to do any of the rest of us any harm, and so to be worth beheading. That could have been the class inbreeding, I assumed then; but later I hit on the idea that it might in fact have been a deliberate, Machiavellian plot. Underneath the bonhomie and the apparent stupidity were devious minds intent on doing great damage to their country and to ordinary people, but concealed under this clever mask. The theory comes back to me when I regard our current – not strictly aristocratic, but pretty nobby – prime minister. No-one thought such a silly upper-class gaffe-prone clown could ever be dangerous. For one thing he wasn’t bright enough. (Learning Greek tags doesn’t make you intelligent.)

But here we are, on the verge of what could be a fundamental transformation of Britain and her constitution, cleverly thought-out in all its steps and details, under the leadership of this bobo.

Except, of course, it’s not his brains that are behind this, but the terrible Dominic Cummings’s. Boris provides the cuddly cover to what is suspected to be Cummings’s soft version of fascism. Which is why, of course, Johnson was so desperate to hold on to him after the ‘Durham’ fiasco of a few weeks ago. And despite the fact that he can’t even button his shirt up properly.

Well, I sent what I thought was the final version of my book off to the publishers this morning, together with the contract, signed via ‘Adobe eSign’. (That took some time to master.) Good, I thought; I can put the book out of my mind now, lie back in my deckchair in the sun, and concentrate on the sill, the aquavit and our Swedish friends, who are coming over soon. (In fact we have friends arriving all through the weekend. Not from Britain, sadly, due to you-know-what.)

But of course it never works out like that, does it? Almost as soon as I’d pressed the ‘send’ button I thought of things I’d left out. I should probably have waited longer before posting it off; but I was worried that, if I did, something might go wrong with my laptop, and the whole book would disappear. (I actually had a nightmare of that happening last night.) So at least there’s now a second copy in the hands of Bloomsbury Press. And their computer won’t blow up at the same time, surely?

The book is a series of mainly old essays on a variety of topics, but all bearing  – loosely – on Britain’s informal – that is, not official or diplomatic – relations with the continent of Europe over the past 200 years. What I’ve missed out is something that only occurred to me after reading through the chapters again; which is how the situation of each side of the equation in these ‘informal’ ways has changed fundamentally over that period, and indeed in many ways has swapped over in relation to the other. So for example, while in the 19^thcentury Britain was the most open and welcoming European country to refugees and other immigrants, now she is one of the most mean and restrictive; where she used to be pretty philistine (I have a chapter on that), now her ‘arts’ are in pretty good shape; where she was a shining light of (political) liberalism, she is now far behind many of her neighbours in that regard; where she once had the free-est press, she’s now reckoned to be near the bottom of the scale in terms of press freedom; where she used to be the most (relatively) democratic nation in Europe she is now the least so by most indices, and also one of the most Right-wing; and where she once prided herself on her public honesty and integrity by contrast with others, she is now acquiring the reputation of being one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. All that must have a bearing on the relations between the two ‘sides’; and must also, incidentally, undermine any notion of a stable British ‘national identity’, based on the virtually unchanging history to which many in the ‘Brexit’ debate, on both sides, have recourse.

I must get my final chapter back in order to flesh out this simple point. In the meantime, though, I have some sill and aquavit to consume.

So the Vikings weren’t all terrible rapists and pillagers, but only the Danes! Norwegians were brave explorers, Swedes enterprising merchants to the south and east. That fits in with the early history of the part of England I come from, where our bloodthirsty, axe-wielding oppressors were always called ‘Danes’. And with Kajsa’s insistence that the Swedes were never part of that tradition, but always peaceful Social Democrats at heart, with a useful side-line in flat-packed furniture.

Not sure about its depiction of the English…

What the last four or five years has shown us is how easily what is called ‘democracy’ can be manipulated. Clever planning or plotting – ‘conspiracy’, if you like – can turn it into almost any direction. This isn’t a new revelation, of course, but the transparency of it nowadays may be. Both the Left and the Right, and various other religio-political factions, have been manipulating us for centuries, to an extent that makes it almost a natural part of ‘democracy’: what could be ‘undemocratic’, after all, about a trick that we all fall for?

In recent years, however, certainly in Britain and the USA, it has been the Right that has used trickery most widely and successfully; with one of its cleverest tricks being the lie that the Left is conspiring against it. Trump of course is the prime example of this: think ‘fake news’ and ‘voter fraud’. In Britain Dominic Cummings is the great Machiavelli, using simple slogans (‘take back control’), selective data mining (Cambridge Analytica) and the diversion of popular resentments (against ‘elites’) to help to win first the Brexit vote, and then last year’s General Election; with the assistance, of course, of the amoral billionaire press, and some terribly misled members of the British Jewish community. The Left had few defences against that. It tried honesty and decency, in the person of Jeremy Corbyn, and it didn’t work. Rather, it simply allowed the Right to exploit Corbyn’s perceived weaknesses. Which I suppose points the finger of blame for these defeats on the naivety of Labour’s strategy, unable as it was to counter Cummings’s manipulation with Machiavellian tricks of its own.

We’re seeing the results of this today; with a fundamentally corrupt government – look at all those peerages it has showered on Trusties and donors and Russian-born newspaper owners and a cricketer because he went along with Brexit, and even the Prime Minister’s brother – empowered, it seems, to do whatever it likes – to the NHS, for example, and town planning, Britain’s relations with the EU, and the Civil Service, and the very constitution of the country – without any accountability at all for the moment (meaning until the next General Election, if that ever happens) to the democracy it is supposed to represent. It’s a depressing time for any true democrat. And makes me happy – albeit also rather guilty – to have escaped from it. (It really is wonderful in the Stockholm Archipelago today!)

It’s this that makes me think that maybe I ought to support Keir Starmer as Leader of the Labour Party, despite what I regard as his craven – and expensive – submission to the ‘Israel lobby’ (if that really exists) over the lies it spread about Corbyn’s and the Party’s supposed ‘anti-semitism’ during the last election. Clever politics requires shimmying around powerful obstacles rather than butting against them head-on. It’s what Blair did with the evil Murdoch before his 1997 landslide election victory, to ensure the newspaper support he regarded as essential. You need to appease the Devil in order to have any hope of winning in a loaded political environment. Then, and only then, can you set about changing that environment – press reform, electoral reform, political education, and so on – in order to make things fairer, more purely democratic, in future contests.

I thought Kajsa could help me with this, as an expert in ‘Gender Studies’, but apparently postmodernists don’t bother with these biological things. My question is this. Bearing in mind that gender differences – and ambiguities – aren’t implanted immediately after conception, but only a few months in, which is why men have nipples (in case things go the other way in utero): do we men have scrunched up uteruses (uteri?) inside us, and women minuscule scrotums (scrota?) inside them?

Not an entirely serious question, though I’d welcome any suggestions. But it illustrates how my mind has been liberated since arriving in Sweden a week ago, so that it’s no longer obsessed with Brexit and Boris and all the rest of the awful stuff that has been buzzing around in it while I’ve been imprisoned (‘shielded’) in the UK, but can now focus on trivialities. Freedom is the ability think about silly things.

More serious observations later, I hope. I still of course get news from ‘Home’. It seems just as crazy, but no longer quite so personal. My eternal thanks to Sweden for granting me another and – at present – more congenial ‘Home’.

At last! Sun and sanity at our island sommarhus! The ideal quarantine – no close neighbours, lots of country to move around in, and a lovely bay for swimming; safer therefore than the crowded UK. That’s if I didn’t pick up coronavirus unaware on the flight over. I should know that in a few days’ time – they say it takes 5-6 days before the symptoms show. Visitors would be welcome, social distancing permitting. There’s another little stuga on the estate for guests. Of course, we’ll have to tell you about the toilet arrangements before you decide….

I may stay here for good. It’s such a blessed relief to get out of England just now. I never thought I’d write that; or at any rate, with such feeling. But it’s not my country any more; nor the country that features in my forthcoming book of essays, Britain Before Brexit, which I’m putting the final touches to now. The UK looks to be well on its way towards a more cuddly kind of fascism. Maybe the braver thing would be for me to stay and fight. But the internet gives me the opportunity to do that from here, albeit feebly. I only wish academics were listened to more.

Serious political commentary will follow. That is, if I don’t get the virus. In which case there are worse places than this to struggle to breathe my last.

Well, eventually I did it! Managed to get away from Borisgrad (or should it be Dominicgrad?) to (relatively) sane Sweden; albeit with a bit of sacrificing-of-my-principles along the way. The hated Ryanair was the only option open to me, without travelling through London on crowded and probably virus-infected trains; with just a couple of flights a week from Stansted. I took one of those on Sunday, travelling from Hull to Stansted by taxi – only the driver to fear – hoping for the best on the plane (I found that I couldn’t after all hold my breath all the way), and being met at Skavsta Airport by Kajsa in her car. Despite our long separation she refused to let me hug her in greeting, in case I’d caught the virus on the flight. After another two weeks we may be able to touch.

I was all the more grateful to get away from England after hearing my (pleasant) driver tell me that he had intended to vote Labour in the last election until he learned about Jeremy’s ‘anti-semitism’. Only a single example, I realise, but it suggests that the vile libel may have taken hold. I shall never forgive organised  Jewry in Britain for that. Later I’ll recount the Labour party’s response to my own self-submission to it, citing my blogs, on grounds of anti-semitism. It ruled that certain statements of mine could be construed as anti-semitic, including my repeated assertions that they were not; but that they weren’t quite bad enough to merit my expulsion.

But I may resign anyway; certainly if they expel Corbyn. I’ll continue voting Labour, but no longer want to be proudly associated with it. If only there were an alternative. (Attlee’s party would have done.)

There’ll be more commentary when I’ve settled into our island retreat, and finished a couple of boring bits of work, copy-checking. Here’s the picture on my phone that kept me hopeful and sane during our months of enforced separation. (It’s taken from the back of our stuga.) ‘Where is my Engelsman?’

The ‘Russia Report’ – on Russian interference in British politics – is apparently to be published next week. It was supposed to come out before the 2019 General Election, but has been sat on by the Prime Minister, for various flimsy reasons, until now.

One of the reasons was that the cross-party Intelligence and Security Committee, which was supposed to vet it first, hadn’t done so. That’s because the new government hadn’t yet set the Committee up. Then it at last did so (my local MP, by the way, is a member: I must write to her); with Boris Johnson planning to make one of his trusties – the notoriously incompetent Chris Grayling, universally known as ‘Failing Grayling’ – the Chair. You can guess why. Then – yesterday – the newly-convened Committee instead elected Julian Lewis, another Tory, but one who knows something about security issues, as its Chair; as it was entitled to do. He was immediately expelled from the Conservative Party by Johnson, in what looks like an almost Trumpian fit of pique. So it appears that the Committee now will be issuing the ‘Russia Report’, at least in some form; how heavily ‘redacted’ we can’t know.

The main questions we all hope the Report will answer concern Russian interference – official or otherwise – in the Brexit Referendum of 2016, and in the General Election of December 2019. In both cases the interference is supposed to have been designed to favour the Brexit side of the argument, and the party that was seen to be pushing to break up the European Union, which of course has been a Russian – and before that a Soviet – ambition for years. We already know that both the Conservative Party and the Brexit movement have received large donations from rich Russians. Beyond that, it’s mainly speculation at present.

The very prospect of the Report’s publication, however, seems to have put the wind up the government. Hence the play it made yesterday, reported in the papers this morning, of (a) Russians trying to steal coronavirus research from us; and (b) Labour’s evidence of American designs against our NHS having been secured originally by Russian hackers (but then published more widely). All this is supposed to imply that it’s Labour who are conspiring with the Russians, thus taking us back to an old Cold War trope. Will it work? We’ll see.

With regard to the research hacking: personally I can’t see what is terribly wrong with that, so long as Russia doesn’t intend to use a newly-discovered Covid-19 vaccine for the exclusive benefit of its own people alone. (That’s what Trump is planning, if America gets there first.) The more openness there is in this area, the better.

On a personal note: I’ve at last found a way to escape from my coronavirus confinement back to Sweden at the end of next week. It involves a 200-mile ride by taxi and then Ryanair, which I’ve avoided in the past out of preference and principle; but as Kajsa says, this is an emergency. If things in Britain (or England, rather) deteriorate any further, I may not come back.

A few days ago I received an email from the New York Times – yes, the NYT!! – asking me to contribute an ‘op-ed’ about this statue-toppling business, based on one of my recent posts on this blog. I’d be flattered if I thought the Times followed my blog, but they probably just got it by Googling ‘History Wars’. ‘Of course!’ I wrote back; and composed the following for them.

Sadly they rejected it. They gave me a reason, which I don’t quite understand; but clearly the article was not what they were looking for. Fair enough. Listening to the report from Trumpland this morning on the radio, I wondered whether my plea to keep some statues standing might be thought to be too close to the Donald’s recent objection on the US’s Confederate-statue-toppling movement as an attack on ‘our history’; although I took pains to emphasise how different our two situations are, and how my argument for keeping the old rogues in public view is the precise opposite of his. Anyhow, I’m not boverred by the rejection; but so as not to entirely waste my Thursday morning’s work, I’m reproducing the original ‘op-ed’ . Much of it repeats what I’ve written in previous posts. Here goes.

*

I must say I felt a visceral thrill when the statue of the 17th-century slave-trader Edward Colston was unplinthed and unceremoniously tipped into a dock in Bristol (UK) the other day.  And I won’t shed a tear if the effigy of that dreadful old capitalist-imperialist Cecil Rhodes is eventually removed from the front of Oriel College, Oxford, as the Master and Fellows have now apparently, if tardily, agreed. But these ‘history wars’ leave me uneasy nonetheless. That’s for a number of reasons, none of which should imply any sympathy, let alone admiration, for the men (it’s always men) who were originally honoured in this way.

Of course the situation is different in Britain from what it is in the USA. We don’t have your tradition of slavery on our soil, and its only-too-visible inheritance of racism, quite properly highlighted by the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. The ‘blacks’ who migrated to Britain from the 1950s onwards did so voluntarily, insofar as one can regard flight from starvation or political oppression as ‘voluntary’. The ordinary Britons’ involvement in slavery was at arm’s length, through the African slave trade, and the profits they made from that and from the cheap imported consumer goods that slave conditions in the colonies and post-colonial America produced. Still, the historical scars for present-day African-Americans are clearly deeper and fresher than they are for Britain’s non-‘white’ community, and exacerbated by the way statues of Confederate leaders are used as focuses for white racists today. It’s this that must explain – and, to my mind, justify – the stronger feelings that motivate those who want to pull them down in the USA.

I have three reasons for objecting to the same course of action in Britain. The first is that it can be a distraction. The Colston de-plinthing is an example: a debate in Parliament the next day which was supposed to be about ‘Black Lives Matter’ was turned instead into one on ‘hooliganism’, which of course suited our right-wing government’s ‘law and order’ agenda far better. Backwoods Tories, whose instincts were probably racist but couldn’t admit it, were rubbing their hands in glee.

Second, the protest quickly moved on from slavery and the more oppressive kinds of imperialism to target anyone who had ever expressed racist or ‘imperialist’ opinions, or had – for example – held stocks in an imperial enterprise, perhaps unbeknownst to them. This is what is behind the movement in Britain to dethrone Churchill; who, yes, did have some pretty awful views of ‘natives’, flirted with eugenics, and could be said to bear some of the responsibility for the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 – but of course had other achievements too. That’s why he is commemorated in bronze in Parliament Square. Indeed, scratch the surface of almost any of these effigies and you’ll find something dodgy about most of them. Even Gandhi, whose statue lies very close to Churchill’s (who was very rude about him) held racist opinions about black South Africans early in his career. Many of the first suffragettes were not too sound on race. In Sweden there’s a movement to topple the statue of the great botanical scientist Linnaeus, on the grounds that he had invested in the Swedish East India Company. Where will it end? Soon there’ll be no public statuary left.

In Britain we have a particular problem with ‘imperialists’, who are often bundled into the same category as slavers, racists, Fascists and even Nazis, though the word should by rights cover a much wider range of opinions and deeds. One interesting case is that of the Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who was certainly an imperialist, and a pretty fierce one, but one of whose leading motives was to eradicate the cruel Moslem Arab slave trade from central Africa: the one that captured many of the Africans who were then sold on to the European slave-traders on the west coast. His statue in St Asaph is under threat too. Should it be?

As an ‘imperial historian’, what I object to most is the over-simplification of our (British) history that this encourages. History is complex, and if it’s to be at all enlightening, let alone useful, it needs to be studied more subtly than in terms of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ alone. We can disagree about Churchill, or Stanley, or Gandhi; but let them be there and visible for us to argue over. If the ‘worst’ racist and imperialist statues were removed from Britain’s streets – and, to tell the truth, there aren’t all that many of them – the impression given to passers-by would be of a country noted only for its philosophers, artists, novelists, doctors, nurses and suffragettes. Oliver Cromwell (another target) famously instructed his portraitist to paint him ‘warts and all’. The streets of our cities should do the same.

This is my third objection to the statue-toppling movement: that, however much it may be raising awareness temporarily, it would leave behind it a sanitised view of Britain’s national history that would fool everyone, and enlighten no-one. Better, surely, to leave the old villains standing, but more honestly labelled, with accounts of their crimes as well as of their achievements; and supplemented by statues of more admirable figures. Some of those could be anti-imperialists – who represent as important a tradition in British history as does imperialism. We already have an amazing one of Boudicca near Westminster Bridge; several of Richard Cobden, who was regarded as an anti-imperialist in his time; and one in Hull of the great anti-slaver – but still a Christian imperialist – William Wilberforce. We could add JA Hobson, who more or less invented modern anti-imperialism; ED Morel; R Palme Dutt; Emily Hobhouse; Wilfred Scawen Blunt; Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia), and several Labourites; ending up with Jeremy Corbyn. We might add to them some collective sculptures of the victims of imperialism: a gang of black slaves in chains, for example; Indian rebels being shot from guns; starving Bengalis. Leaving the empire aside for the moment, but concentrating still on giving a representative picture of British history through its public statuary: how about some poor oppressed domestic miners, peasants and factory workers, who could be regarded as just as much victims of the time as – at any rate – ‘free’ colonials? All that would place the racist and imperialist statues in a proper context. I’d prefer this to hiding them away in museums. Whoever goes there?

I’ve just had a letter – yes, a proper letter, in an envelope – from ‘HM Government’, telling me that my doctor (sic) has told them that I’m ‘no longer considered to be at the highest risk of severe illness from Coronavirus’, and am therefore no longer in the ‘shielding’ category: unable to step outside my house, etc. I was little disappointed – took it as a demotion; and like most people apparently who have received this letter I don’t altogether trust the government – this government – to know what’s good for me. With regard to ‘self-isolation’ and ‘shielding’ I’ve used my own judgment up to now, which luckily has coincided with the Government’s; but peeking out from my curtains today, and reading the papers, I can’t see what has really changed. So I shall continue being careful, sneaking out for my pint of milk from the corner shop, or to visit neighbours in their gardens; until I see the Hull Council waste disposal vans clearing all the dead bodies away.

I plan to risk travelling to Stockholm as soon as Humberside Airport renews its flights to Schipol for a connection to Arlanda. (At present the only flights out of there are to Aberdeen and to the North Sea Oil rigs – nearer, but not quite near enough.) I may stay there for good – in our sommarhus. I’m not sure that Sweden’s response to the virus has been much better than Britain’s, but at least it hasn’t got an Old Etonian in charge. I’m done with England.

For the time being I have work to do, preparing two books for publication. Don’t be too impressed: one is a new edition of an old book, the other a collection of old essays. Hence the radio silence.